Perpetual pineapples. How to produce more pineapples

hey this is randy from Randy's tropical plants today is gonna be a video on pineapples on how to maintain pineapples once they've already bloomed and produced for you now there's lots of videos out there on how to grow pineapples especially on how to turn the crowns into plants I'm actually gonna mention that in this video but I'm gonna talk a whole lot more in depth there's going to be information on how to fertilize the pineapple how to maintain the pineapple once it's bloomed what the different parts of new growths are thus you've got the Crown's the slips the suckers the rat toons you're going to see all of those how to remove them how to plant them how to prune the plant so I hope this video will be really useful for you thank you so much for watching so this is the pineapple just before I harvest it you can see it's got two suckers on it these two big suckers right here I'm gonna take this one off I'm gonna leave this one on and I'm gonna harvest this pineapple right now so I harvest it by simply grabbing it here and twisting it to the side just the sideways twist just like that that's actually how I'm gonna remove the crown from this - made some pineapple videos in the past but they weren't exactly very detailed and I've had a lot of people request more details from those from from those videos I am gonna show you how to grow a pineapple from the crown today there's lots and lots of videos on that online but I'm since I'm gonna do it I might as well show you how I do it but I'm what I am gonna show you that there's not a lot of videos for online here's what to do once you harvest the pineapple how to prune it how to care for it after that because the most common question I get is what what happens to the pineapple after it produces fruit does the plant die will it produce another fruit will it ever bloom again or do I just have to grow it from the crown again I'll answer all of those questions and I'll show you in a great detail exactly what to do to get more pineapples sooner and get big beautiful pineapples like this now I harvest this this pineapple a little early it's mostly yellow it smells it smells real nice and pineapple E right now but I probably want to eat it until it turns completely yellow I would like to leave it on the plant until it does that but if I were to do that in my yard either a raccoon or a possum or a rat would eat this pineapple once they start to smell pineapple e I have to harvest of them otherwise otherwise I won't get to eat them at all but pineapple plants do not produce the sugar inside the fruit the way a lot of other fruits do a banana for instance produce starches inside the fruit and then the starches are converted into sugars via enzymes once the four it begins to ripen that doesn't happen inside of a pineapple when you harvest a pineapple it has as much sugar as it's going to have the flavor is going to change because it's gonna ferment and the acids break down and the oxalic via calcium oxalate crystals are going to break down because of enzymes but the sugars the amount of sweetness is exactly what it's going to be the minute you harvest it so you really do want to let them get to as close to ripeness as you can get and if you don't have problems with rats raccoons and opossums in your yard odd wait until they're completely orange and that's what I would have done but I wouldn't get to eat this if I did there'd be a big hole and a rat would have chewed its way into it so anyway I will show you all of all of how to maintain your pineapple plants post-production right now so now you can see that in addition to the two suckers that are on there there are two slips and they're attached to the flower stand here so we're gonna break those off these you can't leave on the plant they have to come off because this flower stock is going to die soon go ahead and pull them both side a twist now we have the two suckers that are left now there's no rat tunes on this plant but if there were they'd be coming up through the ground near the base of the plant there aren't any so which I had a rat tune to show you but I don't we've got two suckers on the plant two good-sized ones we're going to leave this one on this is the bigger one it's the more robust one so now if you get down to the bunnies to leave them up small you got to get it down at the base of else we're gonna grab it as low as we can and twist it off sideways as well No and you have something just like the crown on the top of a pineapple you can see there's pity core right there so we're gonna plant this just like you would the Crown's in the slips so now what's left is just the original plant the rosette of the plant with the flower stem coming out of the center the inflorescence here and then you've got the sucker growing up next to it I'm gonna leave this in here it does not need to grow roots it's already got this beautiful root system down here this thing is just gonna grow like crazy so I'll show you the difference I've got across my yard I have from last year the sucker plant that's exactly one year old right now from this point and I'm gonna show you that it's planted very near a slip just like the ones that came off of the flower stem on the side I'll show you the difference between one that's left on the plant and a little one that you'll get your root out and grow so this is the sucker from last year that I left done you can see almost one year exactly to the day it has another flower on it so you don't have to wait for two or three years before you get a bloom you can get them every single year and this is the slip and it's just a little tiny guy it's got another year to go at least at least but anyway just wanted to show you this one I had to tear off and root just like those little slips over there this one already had its own root system and it just got to growing right away and now it's bloom in and I'll get another beautiful pineapple out of it all right now this is the same plant in January following January and I wanted to show you this I've been slacking on finishing this video I still have a little more footage I want to take but in the meantime this thing popped up this is a rat tun this is what I was talking about now I'm gonna be pulling this off of the plant this is the original pup that I left on this is actually a sucker from between the leaves the original plant that was their rosette that was growing is pretty much mostly gone at this point it's this is here it is this is the flower stock and here's some of the older leaves mostly this plant is all the new foliage and so I'm going to dig this out and I'm going to show you how it's attached it's it's coming up off of the rise on the plant you can see it's actually coming up from the plant itself it's coming up from underground there's actually space between it in the ground and it's coming up from the rhizome so I'm going to dig that out and move it because we don't want these and they're too close to each other they're gonna be competing with each other and this guy's gonna produce a great big beautiful pineapple real soon we just got a freeze and you can see there's a little bit of frost damage on these on these leaves just on this one too pretty bras damaged but this plant will be fine I actually don't even cover but pineapples when we get these fries events and I've never actually lost a pineapple from a freeze I've gotten a lot of damage like what I just showed you but I've never actually lost when we got down into the 20s so I got a lot of pineapples out here in this field of pineapples that have got a lot of burned leaves on them but they're they're all gonna be flying and I'll probably get some nice fruits this year okay now I have dug a way to soil and you can see this is the the rhizome the original rise I'm over the point and look it's got another ratoon like it started to form right there but this is a ratoon up off of the rhizome and I'm just going to snap this guy right off just like I have all the others came off pretty easily there we go already rooted and ready to go into a pot and I'm just gonna put the mulch and everything back to work lungs there we go easy peasy rice and cheesy now we've back to just one growth not competing with itself anymore so a lot of people when they harvest the tops off the pineapples a lot of videos they'll cut they'll cut the top off problem with doing that is that you're leaving some with a fruit attached to the bottom there's stem tissue inside of this crown down near the base of it we're gonna expose some of that but we don't want to need that fruit on the moment cuz that's gonna rot that's gonna allow bacteria to get in there and it could rock the entire crown so the way I do it is exactly the same way I just kind of slide my hand up like this up and get it right on the bottom and then with a twist on the side just like that and then I'll actually maybe even cut a little tiny bit off the bottom of there the very next thing I'm going to do is you want to pull all these little leaves off the butter and you don't have to be all that careful that I just grab them and yank when you pull them like to the side a little bit they come off a little more easily so and I can see here this is already got I'll show you on the camera close-up hopefully I'll get it keep going a fair amount you want to expose you don't need these little leaves and that's probably good you want to expose at least a good inch when it starts to taper a little bit like that that's when I stop it you could keep going if you wanted if you look right here there's already roots I hope the camera is getting focusing on that there's already roots and that's common all that other time so I may not actually I might just just shave a little bit of that off the bottom just to make sure that that doesn't rot and then this is going to be rooting within a week or two this is going to have nice big healthy root system on it I'll dig it up and I'll show that to you know in another week just to show you how well it roots what you do it the way I do it okay so you can see here these are the two slits that I got off of the plant this is the crown that I kicked off with the pineapple fruit and this is the sucker it's the big sucker that I pulled off off of the plant as well you can see I did the same thing to all of them I peeled some of the leaves off of the base of all of them now the crowns and the slips because the plant is preparing for these to fall off at some point and hit the ground and then grow they already have they already have little roots on them all of them do but the sucker the plant didn't intend for this to ever fall off it was going to grow into a new rosette but it had to and I only wanted to have one the reason I only wanted to have one is because I've want that plant to focus all of its energy on the one sucker that I left on and so I took this one off if you would left them both on you would eventually get too pineapples on that on that plant but those pineapples wouldn't be as big and beautiful and sweet and delicious as the one that I got today and by taking this one off the plant will focus all of its energy on the one remaining sucker that I left on but this one will eventually root doesn't have root nubs on it yet but it will eventually Bruton grow into a plant just like these will so in addition to the sucker that's left on the plant which will grow a pineapple I got four additional plants and that's that's how you can very quickly increase your pineapple patch to to a very large size but I'm going to plant these out now and I'll show you how I do it okay so I'm about to plant these guys but I decided to do this real quick hopefully this shows up well on the camera I made these two lines here on this pineapple crown this is the actual crown for the top of the fruit now what this line represents is the line you want to go at least this deep when you plant it in the soil then there's a dotted line on the opportunity this is sort of like a no-fly zone you don't want to go beyond that because if you plant it deeper than that the meristem tissue which is way down in the center here will actually be below so this is about the level of where that meristem tissues at and if it's below the level of the soil then soil will pack up on top of it and it'll rot and it will die if you have it too shallow you might know a lot of the roots are going to come from the skin up here and you just might have not enough contact with the soil to grow roots efficiently and then the plant could just like dehydrate and die before it gets a chance to root out so there's this sort of like nice optimal zone I'm going to probably shoot for of the soil level Venus somewhere around here but I'm gonna pump these all up right now well I'd rather be making this video outside right now that it's raining today and I got I had to get these planted up so you can see now the dark line is now buried under the soil the Spotted line that I showed you was above the soil and that's perfect right there so now the trick is to leave this out in a shady spot not in full Sun it doesn't have a root system yet so full Sun would sizzle this thing up we're gonna move this thing gradually out into more and more light once it get some nice roots on there well I'll show you what they look like how's that how they grow roots as it starts growing some roots and here we are it's ten days later you can see the same pineapple top with the same lines I drew on it and there's this roots I don't want to disturb the roots too much I'm just gonna pop pop it back in the soil I just want to show you that real quick I wanted to show you this really quickly this is a difference between a pineapple in the ground and running in a pot this is one of the this is one of the suckers that I took off of that plant now this is a really common issue with pineapples I'm actually kind of glad it happened some of these spots her from cold damage but this lighter sort of chartreuse green color as opposed to this nice dark dark green color this is an indication of lacking in iron it's a real common issue and so I'm gonna take this opportunity this is actually not the time of year I generally would be fertilizing these but because I've got all the ones that I took off there are now starting to show this chlorosis I am going to make up a batch of fertilizer and show you how I do it anyway if your if your pineapples are starting to turn this very light bright green color that's generally the reason it's a very common issue with pineapples so I'm gonna make up the fertilizer which is going to include some iron I'm gonna show you a few different options of what kind of fertilizers into iron and iron you can use and hopefully this video won't get too long but it's very useful information for pineapples okay so this is going to be a bit controversial but the product I use to fertilize my tomatoes or my sorry my Tomatoes the product I use to fertilize my pineapples is this Miracle Grow for tomatoes now to all of my crunchy granola hippie peeps out there I love you guys first of all and I do love organic gardening techniques and I use them and it's a good way to do it and if you want to do that just use a formulation that is an organic formulation for Tomatoes that'll work just as well I am with you guys when it comes to pesticides I don't put pesticides on my food plants at least not harsh you know chemical organophosphate or the nasty guys I'll use neem and other other things as a direct then and other natural pesticides but not the nasty guys not on my food plants but when it comes to nutrients you know phosphate is phosphate nitrate is nitrate there's a lot of weird beliefs out there about that and we can have discussions about that if you want but this is what I use but any formulation whether the organic or definitely not organic you can you can use that but what I do is I cut this down to 1/5 strength so this product says to use one tablespoon for a gallon I'm going to put 1 tablespoon of this into a five-gallon bucket now to this I will also add a chelated iron supplement there are other ways you can do this now you can also use sometimes what I'll use is a granular 10-10-10 formula as the fertilizer and then a granular iron supplement such as iron ayat or milorganite alright and milorganite have their own problems too there's a lot of people that don't like those products because they are mined tailings and they contain other heavy metals and really small amounts but they do contain them and if that's something you're concerned about that's definitely something to look at I like this company Southern AG they make a lot of really good products their products are cheap and very high quality this is a good source of iron anyway this says to use one tablespoon tablespoon per gallon as well I'm not going to put even anywhere near that amount in there I actually don't measure it I'm just gonna put a little tiny splash in there which I'll do right now that's it not even a teaspoon now I just mixed in that water you'll notice that that that that's it's still clear it's got a slightly amber color to it now this is really important if your water is highly chlorinated chlorine is a strong oxidizer and even if your iron is chelated the iron will oxidize and turn a rusty cloudy color and that will all be clouded over and if that happens you know you've got a lot of chlorine in your water and what you need to do is dechlorinate that water beforehand otherwise you're really just making rust you might as well just stick nails in the pot because that iron is not going to be very available to your plants but when you put the iron in the water if it's still completely trans transparent like this it'll change the color to a to a sort of like an amber color but if it's still transparent not cloudy then you're good that iron is still in a perfectly usable form for the plant this is very important now I'm going to add the fertilizer and will then raise the volume up all the way up to the five gallon mark okay so that's one tablespoonful little less than one tablespoon I always go light on fertilizer always always always never actually fertilize what they say to use on the package you can burn your plants doesn't matter what kind of plants you're fertilizing never ever ever go full strength on fertilizer also never ever ever under any circumstances fertilize any plant that's dry and dehydrated water that plant very well at least an hour before you feed them anyway let's go ahead and mix this in there I'm gonna bring the volume up and and then it will be ready to go I'm not going to actually show pouring it on the plants because that's that's pretty self-explanatory you just put a little splash of this on there when you go 1/5 strength like this you are are not running the risk of burning the plant so you just go ahead and splash it on there and I use sometimes even go down to one tenth strength and so so even like half of a tablespoon to the 5 at that point you can really start feeding your plants weekly I call that the weekly weekly regimen as in weekly w ee k ly w e a k ly weekly weekly and you get really really results with that kind of a feeding regimen and that's that's true for most plants if you follow the instructions and give them a big whopping dose once a month you kind of burn their roots a little bit you give them the food they need but then the rest of the month they don't really have exactly what they need it's not the best way a better way is to go much lower really of course as all of you crunchy granola hippie peeps will say the best way is to give them lots and lots of good organic matter how'd it do it the natural way and that really is the best way but it's not always the easiest way it's not always the fastest way and when your plants are definitely hurting for iron Louie mine are right now and those ones those ones that are in the pots you got to do this right away and not another week or two those will green up and pretty soon those are gonna go into the ground but anyway I just wanted to show you how I did this and give you a little bit of a discussion about this and choose your own way there is not one right way or wrong way to feed your plants or to cultivate the beauty and the food around you choose what is best for you choose it from logic not from emotion and and go forward and I hope you guys have lots of success but this is how I do it now if you've watched this far thank you so much I hope you got all the information that you needed on how to maintain your pineapple plants I hope you're gonna get lots of delicious pineapples in the future you may have noticed I'm not posting videos quite as often and that's because I'm doing these longer form videos I have lots of videos in the works right now so keep keep watching for them they're gonna be a little longer a little more informative because that's what you guys have been asking for if there's anything specifically you guys want please do ask for them in the comments I look forward to hearing from you guys also try to keep your questions comments on point and positive I've been getting a lot of people come with these long emails about all their medical problems I don't respond to them people like that get angry with me I want to be there for you but I don't want to be your pen pal or your sounding board for problems that you definitely need help for but I'm not here to help you for but as far as like plant questions or if you are looking for plants or anything like that I'm absolutely here for you and I hope you guys enjoyed it and I hope I helped you out Cheers you

Channel: Randy's Tropical Plants

Views: 599,468

Keywords: pineapple plants, tropical plants, edible landscaping, tropical fruit

Id: I8hc-ohU2xw

Length: 23min 51sec (1431 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 23 2018