By Angela Claire Bjoroy-Karlsen
One of the amassing things about living here is the variety of fruit that I can grow in our garden. And I plan on trying to grow several different types. I will also keep you abreast of the different ways I am going to grow them. In this first one, I will be describing and showing you how I am growing and expanding my pineapple patch. When we bought our property, there were already some fruit plants here, 1 coconut palm, 1 lime tree and several banana and plantain plants.
Since then we have planted, coconut palms, pineapples, and several different fruits trees: oranges both sweet and the local green one which is sour, mandarin, lime, mangos, avocado, papaya, lichee, rambutan as well as cashew nut, chocolate and coffee. Now the last two are mainly as curiosity. As time passes I will be planting more, and different varieties of the ones I already now have growing in our garden and who knows five years down the road I hope that we are self-sufficient when it comes to fruit and that we will have ample to share with the population in our local community also.
Now most of us know there are several different types of apples and cherries. And yes it would have been lovely to also have apple trees in our garden, but apples need a period of cold every year when they “hibernate” if not they will not be able to produce fruit. So I am doing my best to learn about fruit trees that do grow here. Take the mango, for example, there are over 1 500 varieties of mango grown in the world. I have not been able to find the number of varieties grown here in Honduras, but I know that there are several. And I will try to have a nice variety in the garden so that I will have fruit through the whole of the mango season, with is April through September. I will try to graft both mangoes and avocado trees later, as both have up to ten years before they produce fruit if grown from a seed. But this time I am focusing on how to plant pineapples.
My pineapple patch has slowly grown since when we bought the property, during those first three weeks in September of 2019 I planted 6 pineapple tops. And I am already harvesting my first fruit. I have steadily been planting new tops, and we now have 26 plants and there will be more. As every one we harvest we replant the top as well as the tops of the ones we purchase. It looks like we will soon have “pups” that we can propagate from the plants, so who knows, I might decide to make a border along the drive or a second pineapple patch in the garden if it expands too much. So far I believe we have two types of pineapples in our garden.
So starting the pineapple plants from the tops there are some different methods mentioned online, but this is how I have been doing it. When we have eaten the fruit, I cut the top off it. I then clean it so there is no flesh left on it, and peel away the bottom row of leaves until I clearly can see little bumps protruding around the bottom of the stem. I cut the bottom so that there is approximately a centimeter of stem under the bottom leaves. Then place it in a tub of water, making sure that the leaves are above the surface. It has taken two weeks to get nice root shoots, and when they are two to three centimeters long, I place the top in a tub of soil carefully making sure that I do not smack the new roots. I keep it in the tub of soil for the next month or two. And then plant it out into the garden. Believe it or not from then I can forget it and one and a half to two years later I can hopefully harvest my first pineapple from it.
Two of our favourite thing to make the pineapples if we don’t just eat them as is. Are pineapple salsa and pina colada.
Some recipes:
Pina Colada:
Coconut water directly from coconuts
Pineapple chunks, approximately half and half, mix in blender
Add rum to taste
Pineapple-salsa
Pineapple, red onion, garlic, red bell pepper, bird peppers.
Chop ingredients in a bowl