Planting more Sugarloaf Sweet White Pineapple

Jennifer watering in liquid IMOs

August is typically the month when the Sweet White Sugarloaf Pineapple is in full harvest mode.  With all the tops on the fruit we will have it is time to prep more beds.  Because plants often need two years to bear fruit, weed control is very important.  Using weed mat has proven a good strategy with pineapples.

I ran the spader implement on our real tractor over the bed several times to loosen the soil and till in the weeds.  Next step was to use my Japanese hand held digging fork to take all weeds and roots from previous crop out.  This is time consuming and hard work, but helps keep this old guy in shape.

Hands in the Dirt

After this I spaded in some dolomite lime (calcium and magnesium) and watered in some of Drake's oxygenated liquid IMOs.  Then it is back to hand work, shoveling trenches on both side of the garden row and burying the sides of the weed mat.

Now the fun part, planting.   We remove the bottom leaves of each top to expose root nodes.  This allows the tops to root quickly.  Then I cut a small X in the weed mat with a knife and push the new plant into the soil through the weed mat.

Peeling back leaves to expose the roots

The new tops will take two years to fruit.  We will plant all the tops from our harvest and all of the kekeis located at the bottom of each pineapple fruit.  This could be several hundred new plants.  We will leave the suckers on the older plants which are harvested this year.  There is two suckers per plant and they will each produce a pineapple fruit next Summer.  Voila, a bit of hard work now, and sweet pineapple for years to come!

New babies planted!