How to Grow Pineapple Part 1: Care and Propagation

Look at this little guy right here. Pineapple baby. So I was at a nursery and I saw this and it was a little smaller at the time. Maybe I bought it a couple of months back, but I said I have to buy it. It was like $8 on clearance. Why? I have no idea. But I bought it. I forgot about it cause I had other things going on, had some trips planned, but we're back and it's time to figure out how to grow the pineapple. What an amazing plant. It's a bromeliad. These things are actually quite sharp. The leaf tips. So recommend gloves if you're ever working with this guy. But as you can see, we do have a small baby pineapple. Now what we're going to talk about in today's video, cause pineapples take a long time to grow. I can't do the whole video in one fell swoop. Part one is going to be about general pineapple care guidelines and some things about the structure of pineapples that you might not know. A lot of people grow these from tops. That can take two plus years. Of course, if you buy a smaller pineapple start, that's going to dramatically speed your process up. And there's some other ways to propagate the pineapple that we're going to talk about in this video. Okay, so let's take a look at the pineapple. The first thing you'll notice is of course you have your main stalk. You can see this thicker stalk right here where our young pineapple fruit is and then it has its own top. And when we harvest that top, of course, then we can grow a pineapple straight out of this top right here. That's actually not the easiest way. What you'll notice here is you also see a smaller cluster of leaves. And I do recommend gloves if you're dealing with the pineapple guys. This smaller cluster right here is actually a sucker shoot and there's actually another one right there that's hard to see. So I'll zoom in for you guys so you can see that. But both of these are going to be quicker ways to grow. So let's say we harvest this one off. At some point when that's ready, we harvest this off. We'll probably pull one of these off to propagate. And then this one, let's say right here, we might as well let this one grow because it's going to take advantage of the entire root structure that this plant already has. So it's going to be dramatically faster. Now here's something else that's really interesting. You'll notice that you have these sort of offshoots or pups. In the world of pineapples, these are called ratoons and these can all be detached from the mother pineapple. And these will also grow pineapples dramatically faster because you don't have to actually grow out the root tissue as much as compared to like cutting off a top. So both of these, as well as I think if you look very closely, you can see this one over here, we may end up separating those as well. So it's a little bit on pineapple propagation. It kind of does it itself for you. Okay, first step, put on your gloves. I swear I've spiked myself more times than I can count with this. These are actually from Vermont Glove. If you guys haven't checked that company out, these things are hardcore and they're very nice. So thanks to them. But anyways, we're talking about the pineapple. So what I'm going to do here is do a bit of a repot. This is just a pot that I threw it in when I got it back from the nursery. So I do want to put it in its forever home. I'm going to be growing this pineapple in a container. And so the first thing to talk about then is what kind of pot. Well, I'm going with a pretty standard propagation pot. This may even be slightly too deep, but it's the one that I have at the moment. So we're going to go with that. Now, as far as soil goes, being a bromeliad, it's going to want a more sandy loam. These are thick succulent-esque stems, can hold on to a decent amount of water. So I'm going to actually do a mix. I've got some potting mix here, right here from Espoma. And then I also have some cactus mix that I'm going to mix in about 50-50 into this pot and we'll go ahead and go from there. So that's what I'm doing right now. And we can kind of talk a little bit about the interesting history, I guess, of pineapples. What's interesting about them that I didn't know is sometimes when you buy them from the store, I heard this from Mark over at Self Sufficient Me. So shout out to you, Mark, for giving me this information. But I did not know that sometimes they're drilled out where the top will be drilled through. And then of course that destroys the plant tissue, which means that you can't really regrow. And so to me it seems a little, what's the point of that? You know what I mean? What are we going to do? Start our own pineapple plantations and never buy pineapples from the grocery store again? Probably not. So anyways, I'm just mixing this in 50-50 very sloppily and we'll do a little swirling. You're probably saying, Oh, he's not mixing it. Don't worry. We'll do a little swirling because you just don't want it to, uh, you want it to be free draining, right? It's not going to want to sit in water, shallow root system, as well as being again a vermiliad. So it doesn't really want, uh, or need a ton of water retention in the soil. So we'll top this off a little bit more. And I kind of want to ripe this when I, when I repot it. It's looking a little bit, a little bit flaccid if you ask me. So we're going to see if we can do that as well. And again, pineapples can be like two plus, two to three years to go from a top if you're cutting off a top from a grocery store. But if it's a, um, if it's a pre-purchased one like this where it kind of has a headstart, I would say when I bought it, this pineapple was maybe half the size and probably somewhere around right there in the height. And so, uh, it's grown a decent amount. But yeah, I mean, it's going to be way faster if you grow it this way. As far as light goes, as I gently tease it out of the pot here, as far as light goes, you're going to want to give it, um, more or less full sun, although it can handle like a dappled afternoon shade. It can, it can do okay in that, in that world. And so yeah, let's go ahead and take a look at the root system. We've got a little bit of roots peeking out here, but not too much. Really, if it was, if it was already kind of upright and looking okay, I may have just kept it in this pot, but I just wanted to move it into a pot that I know I'm going to keep for a long time. So I'm going to go ahead and add it right there. We may even straighten it out just a little bit. And from here I got to do a little bit of backfilling. So I'm going to, I'm going to mix the cactus and the potting into a separate bucket. Actually I might just backfill with this. But if you didn't, you would mix it and then you would backfill in from here. So before I fill the rest in, I'm thinking I might actually try to separate off some of these ratoons down here. I'm not certain how much good they're doing for the plant in their current state. I mean, they may just be sucking energy away from the plant that I want to grow right now. And so I think what I'll do is I'll see if I can grab and twist. Just give it a nice little twist. It's going to come off pretty easy, I think. Let's see. Hopefully this comes off easy. Oh, we actually even have a little root tissue with it. Okay. So we've got a little ratoon here and this one I'm going to try to pot up as well. I'm going to go ahead and just take off all the ratoons because again, under the general theory of taking energy away from the main, I think this makes sense. Again, this is called epic gardening, not epic. I have a horticulture degree. So some of the time you just experiment and see what happens. There we go. We've got that guy off and let's go ahead and surgically remove this bad boy. The only reason I'm not using gloves here is because it's kind of hard to get thick gloves around there. But this one came off really easy. So take a look at that. It's pretty simple. There's actually another one shooting off right there. So this guy was putting out a lot of little, little ratoons and pups. What I've prepared here is I've got some simple little pots here with a 50 50 mix of just normal potting soil and a cactus mix. So a pineapple wants a sandy loam. That's roughly what that is, I hope. And we're going to go ahead and just gently place these in here and pot them up. And you know, once you get your first, it seems like with pineapples, like once you get your first pineapple off the ground, your first mother pineapple, you have both the sucker shoots that will show up and you also have the ratoons or the ones on the bottom of the plant at the soil surface. Both of those plant organs will, will propagate faster than growing from a top. So it's just a better way to do it. So as I pot the rest of these up, definitely let me know what you guys think. Top comments. I'm considering names for all four of our new pineapple children. So top comments will be the names. I figured why not? And yeah, I mean it's fun guys. It's fun. This is why I like gardening. I like growing stuff, mixing it up, having a different idea. Oh, what if I just pop these off and propagate them, see what happens. You know, a lot of the times I'm growing something, it's my first repetition or it's my first couple tries. And you know, if it's a pineapple, it's like a two, three year plant. You don't get a lot of, like in a life, you don't even get that many tries. So unless you're running a pineapple plantation, you just don't have a lot of opportunity. So I figured why not experiment and see what's going on now that we have a healthy established mother plant out in my front yard. And so that's what we're doing. We're just potting these bad boys up. Okay. So we've potted it up in our 50 50 mix of cactus soil and potting mix, trying to achieve that sandy loam type of soil texture that the pineapple really likes. I'm going to hit it with just a little bit of water and then it's time for placement. Now this has been in my side yard, which maybe gets about half a day's worth of sun. And because I'm now focused on getting this to epic proportions, I'm going to move it out into the front yard garden. We'll find a nice spot for it and see how it goes. So our pineapple is now out in its final resting place. This is my front yard. You can see the dragon fruit is right here. If you guys remember that growing series, pretty exciting. But now that I look at it, there's one, two, three sucker shoots. So it's going to definitely make it not oriented perfectly straight up. But I did tilt it this way because the sun's coming in from this way and I think it might start to shift a little bit more and straighten itself out a little bit. But yeah, I mean pineapple is kind of a long growing plant. So this is part one in the series. Stay tuned and subscribe if you'd like to see part two, which hopefully will be coming out in a few months. Just a growth update and talking about some care. And until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.