Do You Know How to Grow a Pineapple in Hawaii?

Learning to grow a pineapple is easier than you think in Hawaii.

To grow a pineapple has never been high on my list of gardening activities until I came to Hawaii. Even then, I didn’t quite believe it. The sellers of our house had showed me various pineapple plants in the yard that they had planted, which was an inspiration. So I bought a pineapple from the store. Ate it. Can’t forget eating it. Let me tell you, Hawaiian pineapple fresh from the store is as good as gets. So sweet. None of that bitter stuff.

I’m going off a tangent here for a moment because it seems appropriate. Do any of you remember The Beverly Hills Diet? This was all the rage in early 1980. It started off with mostly fruit for a couple of weeks. A few days, if I recall correctly, were all pineapple, all the time, nothing but pineapple. Which resulted in blisters forming inside your mouth that developed from eating so damn much pineapple. It was also sort of bitter. But I lived in Newport Beach then so maybe I wasn’t getting Hawaiian pineapple at the store.

Back to my story about how to grow a pineapple. Before I ate the pineapple, I sliced off the top. I took that top, dug a little hole in my volcanic ash garden and stuck it into the dirt. I had forgotten all about it.

But look at this photo above! This is the pineapple I planted last year. It is growing a pineapple. This is like the coolest thing. A pineapple growing out of a pineapple. The only thing on par with growing a pineapple in Hawaii is maybe growing artichokes. It’s hard to envision where the actual fruit will appear. It’s not like carrots that grow underground or lima beans hanging off a plant.

I also have a. small taro garden. But it needs a lot more tending. Meanwhile, I can’t wait for the pineapple to mature. It can take 18 months for a pineapple to mature. Can you imagine anything tastier than a pineapple from your own garden?

Avocados grow like weeds in Hawaii.

But wait, there is more. We have avocados, too. The tree wasn’t producing much last year but this year it’s going gang busters. Two things we can’t really grow in Sacramento. Avocados and pineapples. I won’t be here long enough to harvest the avocados. Won’t come back until Labor Day.

OK, I promise tomorrow I will talk about Sacramento real estate and stop chatting about Hawaii. There has been a lot happening on that front, too.