My Pineapple Houseplant

Homegrown Pineapple

In July I cut open my first homegrown pineapple and shared it with my family.  It yielded eight baby carrot-sized slices.  The fleshy fruit part was about 4 inches tall.  That's not very big for a pineapple, but it was exciting nonetheless.  Considering the stress I put my plant through, I was lucky to get any fruit at all.

Four years ago I attempted to root three pineapple crowns, and two of them worked.  Not a bad start for my venture into the world of exotic house plants.  They grew really well in my kitchen window, and I really began to believe that this was a nice addition to my emergency food storage.  Then we started remodeling the kitchen, and I moved the plants to a downstairs window behind a curtain.  I pretty much forgot about them.  They were watered about every couple of months.

So when a year ago I decided all of a sudden to revive the plants, they were very yellow, with half of the leaves dried and dead.  However, I am a sucker for reviving not-quite-dead plants.  I repotted them, added a little slow release fertilizer and let them sit under my tree all summer in the shade. They slowly started turning green and grew a few new leaves.  I was thrilled.  Autumn came and I brought them indoors.  The nicer looking plant I brought to the school where I work to see how it would do in a windowless room with fluorescent lighting.  It actually didn't do that bad.  I mean, it didn't die and it didn't turn yellow again.  However, it didn't thrive, and when I brought it home for summer vacation it was very similar in appearance to what it looked like when I brought it there nine months earlier.  No surprise, really.

The other plant just sat on the floor in my living room all winter, near a window with indirect lighting.  I was about to forget about it again, until late last fall I noticed an inflorescence beginning to emerge from the center of the plant.  At first I thought it was just some new leaves.  Soon it really began to look like a baby pineapple crown.  Over the next few weeks a small pineapple developed, and around the new year it flowered with tiny bright pink flowers.  But the pineapple never got bigger.  It never really did anything.  It just sat there looking cute for six months.

In June I brought the plant outside to sit under my tree again for the summer.  This time I decided it would probably like some sun, so I slowly exposed it to greater amounts of sun over a couple of weeks and then let it sit in full sun.  And guess what.  The pineapple began to turn yellow and ripened. 

As you can tell from my narrative, I really had no clue what I was doing.  I have recently read more about growing pineapples and discovered that the whole process of developing a ripened fruit actually does take many months from when the inflorescence first appears.

It took my neglected plant four years to produce, but if a plant is cared for, it will usually begin to produce a fruit in the early part of the second year of its life.  Now that I've actually harvested a pineapple, I'm ready to try again.  This time the goal is to have a fruit in two years.  My homegrown pineapple crown is currently in the process of rooting.

Rooting Pineapple Crown

Recently I read about other methods of rooting, but I stuck with the first way I learned.  After cutting off the crown, I removed the fleshy part so only a little stub remained.  I let it sit on my counter for a week to dry out a bit, then planted it in a mixture of sand and potting soil.  I'm watering it once a week, and if it works, in a couple of months it will be rooted and start to put out new leaves.  Two years from now I'll be sharing pictures of my second homegrown pineapple.

by Sara