Why pineapples take a special place in our family?

   Here is a short pre-story before the actual story gets told. Back in 2014, when I first met Raoul and when within a month time from our first date he asked me to move in with him, we somehow oddly enough started spending most of our weekends as gardening amateurs. It wasn't like we lived in a house with a garden, we were just lucky enough to rent an apartment with a private rooftop terrace, and in order to make a full use of it - starting our own little garden seemed to be a good idea.

   So we started little by little, with some herbs and flowers, then we brought some seeds from my first trip to France. Slowly and gradually, obviously not without failures, but also with quite success, we continued experimenting with local fruits and vegetables as well.

   In case if you are wondering which plants grew well and which ones didn’t, I will write about it more in my next blog.

But today, I wanted to share with you some discoveries we learnt in the process of our so called "trial experiment" with this uniquely beautiful plant - pineapple.

   First of all, it’s important to mention that with almost all our plants we didn’t have any expectations and especially with pineapple, as it’s growing period from planting to harvesting was marked to last 2 years! So we pretty much had little to no expectations from this plant. 

   Pineapple is formed from a cluster of flowers called inflorescence, 100 to 200 flowers fused together to create the fruit. We were astonished by it's life cycle and the various stages of flowering. It was absolutely delighting to observe it changing colours, form and appearance.

   However, you will be surprised how easy it is to grow pineapples! All it needs is the sunlight and as you know in Singapore it’s sunny almost everyday in a year (it’s a pity this country doesn’t produce anything, all you can get here is pineapples imported from Philippines or Malaysia).

 
   It grows with a minimum watering requirement (once a week in a humid country like here will do the job). Adding natural fertiliser like apple cores will help to bring it's first flower.

   Don’t forget to give it a space as it likes spreading it's long and sharp leaves all around itself. So be careful when approaching too close to it, as it bites! ;)

P.S. If you wish to grow your own pineapple here is the link to youtube video how to grow a pineapple. For more pictures of our beautiful pineapples click here. Apologies for the quality of images as it was taken during 2 years sometimes we used phone camera to capture it.