Preserving and Growing Pineapples for Future Harvests

I finally broke down and bought our family's needs worth of pineapple last week. I've watched the prices of the fresh, tropical hover between 1.50 and $1.75. I kept waiting for it to drop to a $1 or below but alas it didn't happen this year. So I bit the bullet and paid the $1.49 asking price for two dozen, mostly green ones. I would have preferred ripe, golden ones, but I realize they have to pick them green to ship them to the mainland.

I set them all in my southern facing windows to ripen. It took a full week. Even the fruit flies didn't notice their existence until the day before I started to cut them up to can and freeze. I pulled 6 wide mouth pint jars out of my stash. These would be for pineapple rings. The about a case of jars worth would be crushed in my hand powered food processor with the rest being cut into cubes for canning or freezing.

I knew my daughter could not help me because she has an allergic reaction to raw pineapple. But my granddaughter was another story. She was out of school for three weeks because her father tested positive for COVID. It turned out to be the Delta strain which none of us were immune to, but I digress. Job one was to wash the pineapple. a sink full of cold water and two caps full of vinegar made short work of this task.

I have to clarify something. My granddaughter is 16 years old. Normally I'd be teaching my grandchildren this at ten or eleven, but I was up in the mountains and missed this part of her education. Now, I'm having to play catch up and dealing with teenage attitude to boot, but she's willing to learn.

My granddaughter took them outside on a kitchen towel and shook the extra water off them. I taught her how to twist and pull the crowns off. She piled them on my door stoop. She asked me why not trash them, and I told her I had something special in mind for them later. Meanwhile, I set about cutting them up for processing. After she took off the crowns, she asked why was I chopping up the cores with the regular pineapple? I handed her a piece of the core. It was just as soft as the fruit only juicier. 

"It's not hard or woody like the last one I ate," she said with some surprise. 

"That's because I let the fruit ripen fully on the window sill.  Now, you see these?" I used the dull edge of my knife and shoved some black specks I had scraped from the pineapples, "those are seeds. We can plant them and in about three years, we'll have pineapples." 

Her next job was filling a food processor so we could jar up the crushed pineapple we'd use. I was steadily stripping the skins off the fruit, chopping them into cubes, and filling jars. Soon (4 hours later, we were done. I poured the dechlorinated tap water to 1/2" headspace, wiped the rim explaining as I did as to why I was doing it. placed the flat and band on the jar. I left her to do the rest. I turned on the heat under the water bath canner. Cold canner cold product, and cold jars. 

I took the bowl of pineapple peels, placed them in a large pot, covered them with water and put it on the stove to heat. Yummy pineapple juice was the result after letting it steep for ten minutes. This was strained and poured into jars too. We water bath canned the jars for 30 minutes.

After a break, we set about cleaning the crowns. I showed her how to pull enough leaves to expose the root band./Then we set each one into quart jars to allow the roots to form.

I further explained to her, "When we have a passel of roots, we'll plant each in a 5-gallon bucket. Within two years, we'll have our own pineapples to harvest. Now you want to preserve the seeds until next spring?"

Her response was a lack lustered, "I guess." I could tell that I lost her. I released her to her phone, friends, and video games. You win some battles and you lose some with teenagers.

The plants would have to over winter in a greenhouse to protect them from freezing even in our 8B planting zone. They grow best in zone 9 or 10. But for now, their home will be on a cardboard covered area near the garden. I knew the cardboard shipping box from my bedside commode would come in handy for something.

That makes sense and cents.