Day 132 / 64 To Go: Pineapple Farming

Posted by: Cris

One of my favorite things about when we lived in Hawaii the first time was my pineapple garden. Over the course of a couple of years I grew 5 or 6 fully mature pineapple plants that were kicking out really good pineapples and continued to do so even after we moved. Every few months my neighbor would send me a picture from his phone of another pineapple coming ripe. So, that was one thing I was really looking forward to about moving back here and having some land to start a sizeable pineapple patch. They take alot of patience (18 months to produce the first fruit and then 1 per year after that) and a little bit of special treatment in how you grow them but that's kind of what makes it appealing to me.

This afternoon I got home from work in time to finish up a small project I'd been working on. Down the hill along the outdoor stairs/walkway, there are these 5 poured concrete catch basins that the front spouting drains into...first into the highest one, then as it fills it flows down to each lower one. It's kind of a cool water feature but ends up just being 4 little lilly pad ponds of stagnant water that is really good at attracting mosquitos and serving as a great place for toads to lay their thousands upon thousands of eggs.

So, they became a major target in my toad eradication mission. A concrete bit on my drill opened them up so they no longer hold water...fill the bottom with a couple inches of coral rocks for drainage (one of the things pineapples require)...some potting soil and we now have a cool series of tiered pineapple planters.

All of these pineapples were supplied by Aunt Wallie so she'll know right where to find them when they are ready to be picked when she's here a year and a half from now.

I THINK the location gets enough sunlight but we'll see. Pineapples are sunshine fiends generally but they can even be grown in a pot indoors so I'm hoping they'll be alright there. The bamboo grove in the front yard shades this area a good bit but recent trimming of the bamboo opened this area up to the sun a bit.

They don't look like much now but by the time they mature they will actually want to branch out bigger than the size of their "planters" so I'll have to trim the leaves on the side of the steps. I can envision it now and it's going to be cool.

Blow on your vegetables before we take them over to the table...

One of these children ate their vegetables...one of them did not. I'll let you guess which one was excited about heading to the table to eat her vegetables and which one was not based on their faces. Luckily, Nova will drink a bit of V8 Fusion juice so she is able to get a couple servings worth of vegetables per day in liquid form.

Tomorrow is the day we prep for the medical students' exam on Friday which means about 4 hours in the cadaver lab which is about 10 degrees...I'm getting cold just thinking about it and by the end of the day, I might actually have a cold.

And just so my wife stops mentioning it...yes, I realize that since there were pictures of me on the blog yesterday, it is glaringly obvious that I haven't gotten a haircut since around Thanksgiving and I look ragged...I have found that those are the types of things I can't manage to squeeze into the schedule for the most part. But, just today at my wife's request, I scheduled a haircut for next week so I will look presentable in future posts on this blog.