Have you ever tried growing pineapple?

The fruit of the pineapple plant.

Growing a pineapple in your house in Canada isn’t easy and takes a lot of time. If you just want a pineapple to eat, don’t bother. But if you like a challenge, let’s go.

It’s a plant

Pineapples don’t grow on trees. They grow one per plant, and the plant is big: between three and six feet wide. In addition to a tropical climate, you need a lot of land to grow pineapples.

A plant looks like a bigger version of the top of a pineapple, and that’s what it is. Big, strappy leaves grow from a thick central stem. Eventually, that stem will grow a spikey inflorescence with about 200 blooms. As those blooms mature, they fuse together to form the fruit.

Pups will grow from between the leaves, and these can be removed to make more pineapple plants. In fact, this is how most pineapples are grown. Pineapples are self-sterile and require a different pineapple variety to be pollinated. In nature, hummingbirds do the pollination. The flowers don’t require pollination to set fruit, though.

Origin

Pineapples are native to Paraguay and Brazil, and they have been cultivated in South and Central America for about 4000 years. Christopher Columbus found the fruit in the Caribbean on his second voyage and brought some specimens back home to take Europe by storm.

So impressed were people with the fruit (and so unable to grow it for a couple of hundred years) that it became quite a status symbol. There are reports that you could rent a pineapple to show off to guests or to bring to a party with you in the 18th century. You wouldn’t eat a pineapple until you’d showed it off and it was starting to rot.

Missing fingerprints?

Pineapples contain bromelain, which is known to break down protein. That’s why pineapple juice will tenderize meat, but also why some pineapples make your mouth hurt: the enzyme is eating away at your flesh!

Pineapple plant in blossom.

There’s a rumour going around that pineapple juice will erase your fingerprints and that people working in pineapple canneries have lost their digital identifiers. It’s not true… well, not exactly. First, people who work with the raw pineapples wear gloves because the bromelain does damage the skin and it’s quite painful. Second, while bromelain can reduce fingerprints temporarily, they will regenerate.

As for using pineapple to tenderize meat, go for it! But recognize that bromelain is so good at this job that the meat will turn to mush if you leave it for too long; an hour is the maximum.

In addition to breaking down proteins, pineapple will also make gelatin unable to gel. Heat makes bromelain ineffective, so cooking pineapple thoroughly will make it useable with gelatin.

The top of the pineapple.

How to grow your own pineapple

Pick up a fresh pineapple.

Grasp the head of leaves at the base and twist. It should come out of the pineapple.

Peel away about an inch of the leaves, starting at the bottom and pulling sideways. Now look closely at the freshly exposed part. You should see some little brown dots or even some small white or brown roots wrapping around the stem.

Plant the stump in potting soil, water it and put it in a sunny window. And wait.

Within a couple of months, you should see new greenery growing from the top. Congratulations, you have succeeded.

The original leaves may turn brown and die; you can tear these off. You’ll know that your stump is developing roots if you give it a light tug and it doesn’t come out of the soil.

Water the pineapple from the top only when the soil has dried out. Water will collect among the leaves. This is good.

In a short two or three years (!) your pineapple should bloom. If it doesn’t, some people recommend putting ripe apples, cut in half, on the soil; the ethylene gas from the apples should make the plant bloom.

Don’t expect to grow a pineapple to feed the masses. It will be small. You simply cannot give it the amount of sunlight that it would get in the tropics. But you will have triumphed where many before you have failed. Huzzah! C

The fruit of the pineapple plant.