Pineapple

Since I know many of you don't have pineapple growing in your backyard, and because I find them gorgeous and interesting as plants... I will share the little I know about the pineapples growing in our backyard. Now this is one tropical fruit I can't get enough of!

So a young plant looks like this. Kind of like teenagers: gangly, awkward and all legs. (And there's my fancy feet in garden shoes. And now is where I should do some really cool connection with our ten-foot-family having two feet in the garden, but I'd rather go eat breakfast than spend forever blogging this morning sorry. =) It's the thought that counts!)

Note that the older the plant gets, the more spiky the outer leaves become, and I'd venture to guess this is good protection for a fruit-bearing plant on the ground.

From the top down the baby pineapple that starts as a cluster of leaves in the center. Love the neatness and order of these leaves. Creative yet organized.

Then those little creatively organized leaves grow bigger. And bigger. Ever so slowly...

And you can start to see that fruit underneath at some point. You should probably know that having a border collie trying to catch his beloved frisbee doesn't work so well for growing pineapples and those spikey outer leaves may just get trampled and broken. And as any good horticulture major will tell you, no foliage means no food for the plant. Dead plant = dead fruit. And on the off chance that you are wondering as I was whether this above yellow one is already ripe at such a young age, it's not. I'm told this is a different variety of pineapple than the others, which is why it is more yellow in both fruit and leaf.

So in our own efforts to protect fruit and leaf:

...we tied the leaves up (leaving room for said border collie to run past without breaking off leaves) with the ribbing leftover from a worn-out shirt. Why not?
Whatever it takes to get luscious fruit! YUM! We eat it fresh, make sweet-n-sour sauce, skewer it, put it in fruit salad, etc. What's your favorite way to eat pineapple?