Pineapples - Changing Plants

This year my garden pineapple plants turned 5 years old. They're straggly, ugly, worn out plants. Time to pull them out. Commercial farms don't let their plants get this old. Why? First of all, they are less productive. The pineapple fruits themselves are smaller. Plus the plants are sprawling in crazy directions, interfering with one another. 

So it was about time to replace those old plants and that's what I've done. I yanked out all 58 of them. But I salvaged the suckers for replanting. Not all the old plants had viable suckers, but others had two, so in the end I'm planting just about the same number of pineapples as I threw out. 

Suckers? How come there are suckers? That's what pineapple plants do. They flower and produce a pineapple fruit, then that part of the plant becomes non-productive. It gets replaced by a shoot that grows out of the stem someplace below where the pineapple got produced. It becomes a full blown sucker that can either be allowed to stay, grow, and produce its own pineapple the following year....or be removed to start a new plant elsewhere. So when I removed the old plants, I cut off the sucker for replanting.

I've moved the pineapple growing areas out of the main garden. Being sprawling perennials, they didn't work out real well there. So I've de-grassed and mulched areas around some macadamia nut trees and alongside one of the pasture paddocks. As I acquire more pineapple tops, I'll open up more spaces for them. But not in the main garden. I'm happier having them someplace that's easier to manage. 

I'm still harvesting pineapples here and there from younger plants I have scattered about the farm. Those fruits will be the source of pineapple tops for planting. And if I'm lucky, perhaps some people in my community will give me a few more. You never know when you'll get lucky.