Growing Pineapples at Home

This is my experience of growing a pineapple at home and the inadvertent production of a fascinating biological curiosity.

I have always loved the idea of growing my own pineapples and had heard that you can grow them from the top leafy part of a pineapple. For a long time I kept my eye out for a pineapple with a leafy top so that I could try it out. Unfortunately all the pineapples that I have come across for many years now have had the tops removed such that they were very dead and brown looking – so I finally succumbed to buying a plant at the garden centre when it was on special. It is a Queen Pineapple (Ananas comosus).

Pineapples are in the bromeliad family and are tropical plants. They thrive in warm, humid, lowland climates with consistent temperatures around 20°C to 30°C and cannot tolerate frost. However, they are highly adaptable and can also be grown in subtropical or warm temperate regions, as long as they are protected from freezing weather.

I decided to grow my pineapple in a pot so that I could position it in the warmest spot I could find and move it to shelter if frosts were likely. Like other bromeliads, pineapples do absorb water and nutrients through the central cup in the middle of the plant but they do like to have moist (but not too wet) soil as well.

It can take a couple of years for pineapples to fruit and for the first year my plant just sat there but wasn’t filling me with any reason for anticipation. I didn’t move it under shelter (as it was a warmer, wetter winter than usual). I went away for a long trip last spring and left it to fend for itself. When I got back, the leaves weren’t looking very happy and the tips had died back – it had been very wet while I was away.

Over the summer some new leaves formed and they coloured to a red shade more like other bromeliads. And then the cutest little fruit formed in the centre. It grew very slowly – I also had no idea how long it would take to grow into a fruit ready to harvest. I thought that watching the top of the pineapple would be the best option, waiting for the green tip to grow up to look like ‘a pineapple’.

I waited and waited and nothing seemed to be happening although the fruit was colouring up. The tip was small and rather peculiar looking: it had half a dozen or so mini-crowns on it. Eventually I decided that the pineapple was ripe and harvested it. Although it was small, it was absolutely delicious and perfectly ripe.

I was intrigued by the multiple crowns and investigated it further: multiple crowns in pineapple, often termed fasciation, is a rarely seen, harmless growth disorder where the plant’s growing tip mutates (possibly through nutrient deficiency), causing it to produce multiple crowns. While this gives a “deformed” look, it is generally considered a fascinating botanical curiosity rather than a harmful disease.

Some suggest that the multiple crowns can be separated and propagated – I will give it a go. However, the plant has sprouted two pups at the bottom so I will propagate it using the more traditional method as well. I will stick with putting them in pots but will pay more attention to fertilising and watering the soil.