GET GROWING!
HOW TO GROW A PINEAPPLE IN CANADA (INDOORS!)
By LADYBUG
A pineapple in a pot? That sounds as impossible as a cake-in-a-mug. But those work and so does this!
I first read about someone who grew pineapples in Toronto a few years ago. Which was amazing enough, for who knew one could grow tropical fruit in our northern climes? What made it jaw-droppingly so was the fact that he grew it as a potted plant, indoors!
I had to try it, too. On our next visit to the grocery, I picked up a ripe pineapple. We consumed the fruit, but I retained the top with the spiky leaves. This, I placed in a container filled with potting soil, deep enough to bury the “skirt” around the top, leaving the crown sticking out. I watered it deeply and sat back for it to grow and yield a magical harvest.
Of course it doesn’t work quite like that, or at least not that quickly. It takes a good little while and tons of patience. For a couple of years the plant just sat there, growing bigger all right, but no sign of the promised fruit. While I harboured dark thoughts about my pineapple possibly being a genetically modified plant that would not reproduce like a normal one would, I kept it going because frankly, by then, I had become fond of the plant. Okay, so that sounds a little flaky, but if you saw the large leaves you would love it for the almost structural accent it provided, too.
A couple of years passed, with the plant going out in summer and being brought in to overwinter by a sunny, south-facing window. It grew larger, it looked happy, and so was I.
Then one spring, I spotted what looked like a teeny-weeny reddish stem poking out of the middle. Was that a nascent pineapple? It became a morning routine to check in on it the first thing every day, watching it grow and plump up, day by day.
It was a pineapple!
No doubt about it as it took on a definite pineapple shape.
Soon it was fist-sized, and had the distinctive shape and pattern on the skin.
I showed it off shamelessly to anyone who visited and our little pineapple became quite the star.
On her return home after lunch at our place a friend texted to let me know she had reached home safely. And to tell me that she had stopped at a grocery to buy a pineapple. “Now tell me what to do with it!” she demanded.
A cousin visiting from India was so fascinated by it that on subsequent calls, even before asking us how we were doing, he would enquire about the pineapple’s health.
Our son’s friend wanted to know if we were going to eat it, and I realized I didn’t want to. I had babied it for so long that it seemed wrong to just treat it like a regular fruit. But, as the pragmatic young man pointed out, it would just go bad if we didn’t enjoy it when it was at its prime.
The fruit was small – by grocery standards – but oh, so delicious.
So this year, make your Valentine’s Day mug cakes and also plant a pineapple in a pot. As for me, I had started another a year after the first one and now that is getting ready to produce fruit!