Over a year ago, now, something was killing things in our back yard. Two Muscovy ducks, a turtle, and a blue jay were left to spread their putrefying gasses over the garden. In an effort to catch the killer, we got a trail camera and mounted ’round the pillar of an old, broken, bird bath. As far as we know, the killer has not returned. We have had no more back yard deaths, and we have never caught whateveritis on camera. We know there are foxes in the area, and our back yard is not secured from wandering dogs… In the meantime, I get very much enjoyment seeing what the camera does manage to photograph. Night shots are informative, but not necessarily clear photography. Here are some birds.
It should be of no surprise that I am once again talking about pineapples. I remember our first attempts at yarding after buying the house. I made a hesitant identification of some spiny, succulent like, grasses planted against the house. Based on a theory that they were pineapples, we moved them. It may have been one of the hardest things we ever did with plant materials. Then they fruited! Now, it seems like pineapples are one of the sure bets in my yard.
So this year, I bring you the seven stages of pineapple. The fruit, that is. The stages of plant would be a whole different thing that, I guess, I should probably get around to documenting as well.
Stage 1
aka this plant is gonna fruit this year. Usually stage one happens around March to May depending on how dry the plants have been over winter.
The flower bud looks like a tiny pinkish proto-pineapple nestled in the whorled center of the plant.
Stage 2
This is where you see actual flowers emerging from the spiny segments of the bud maybe one or two weeks following the initial indication that the plant would fruit. Each flower sets a fruit just like many other fruiting plants. So, each segment is a fruit in its own right, and a pineapple is actually a clustered formation of many smaller fruits.
Stage 3
More weeks pass and the emerging pineapple becomes more recognizable. The segments are still very separate, rough, and sharp, but the overall shape of the fruit and leafy top is beginning to form.
Stage 4
After months, it will seem to you as though nothing is happening, unless you have been photo documenting the fruit’s progress. You can just make out that it is getting bigger, the sections are beginning to flatten and the whole fruit is becoming green.
Stage 5
Another month or so, and you will be able to see the individual sections are completely flattened and filled out. It is still green, or, perhaps, more deeply green, and it has no odor to speak of. This will change soon.
Stage 6
Harvest time! It may seem like weeks and weeks from stage 5, but keep your eyes peeled for the initial signs that it is time to harvest. Ideally, like the image on the left, it would be 1/3 yellow, but you can also harvest slightly before this if the centers of the sections have started turning yellow and you want to guarantee your harvest. I pulled the one in the center because the top side of the fruit was just beginning to get sunburned, as you can see from the pale yellow with orange tints. I also harvested the one to the right as a test to see if there was a too early. I cut the stem holding the pineapple a couple or more inches down and set them up in a vase on the table to finish ripening. Yes, they will.
You can leave the fruit on the plant until fully ripe. However, as the fruit ripens (outside or inside) it will begin to emit a wonderful pineapple-y perfume that many outside critters may find too delectable to resist. I’ve known fellow pineapple growers here in central Florida who have waited eagerly to harvest their fully ripe pineapples only to find them hollowed out by opportunistic raccoons, fruit rats, and ants.
Stage 7
We are now deep in July. After a week and a half on the counter in a vase, the right hand pictured fruit above is totally ripe. As in, cut it up and eat it now, ripe! I could’ve cut it up and eaten before it was quite this yellow, but sometimes the pineapple waits for me and not the other way around.
At this stage of ripeness, I find the fruit tastes like Piña Colada without adding coconut.
There you have it, the seven stages of pineapple fruit in about 5-6 months. Check back for a how-to on carving this beauty!
After five years in the house, we finally got the outside repainted! And prior to that I fixed a planter wall! I felt like Hercules, seriously.
There is a bland trend in my neighborhood toward Tuscan inspired color schemes where the trim is a shade lighter or darker than the base color. I think that’s what ours was intended to be too, though I never quite figured out what the color was supposed to be (even before it faded). A kind of peachy tan? An apricot sand?
Now we have a beautiful, fresh house. The roof still needs cleaning, but it’s gorgeous!
Woman Shopper In A Tampa Grocery Story by Robertson Fresh Photography, Digital Collections, Tampa Library, University of South Florida, https://digital.lib.usf.edu/?r5.15958
I have been digging deep into the history of my 1949 house, which invariably means learning all about everything around it, that is, Tampa. Thankfully, I work at a library with digitized pictures and historical documentation to keep me busy for a long time. I can’t tell you exactly why I love this picture. It could be the cans of Heinz Macaroni above the Heinz Spaghetti…also canned.
It could be the largest cans, also of the healthiest seeming products, that is, turnip greens and the like, are perched precariously at the tippy top. Whatever it is, I think it is important to share this wonderful photo of a lady shopper.
From what I can tell, our house originally had a breezeway that connected the main bit to the carport and workrooms. Sometime in the early 60s this breezeway was turned into an extra room and the workrooms were reconfigured to serve as additional bathroom and bedroom space.
Maybe the unfinished half-wall in the carport was put up during this time. We are learning, as we brainstorm how to deal with the open cinder block cubbies, how previous owners used the wall.
Our latest find: Beer can! It’s from the pre-pop days when you had to punch holes in the can yourself.
Can you see him? This redbellied woodpecker is one of two that I’ve seen around that largish hole in the branch. He was playing hide and seek with me, so this is as good a picture as I could manage. I think they may be nesting in that branch. Fingers crossed that the branch holds up for as long as they need it…it looks pretty dead.
And I’m not talking early in the season, because they are right on time. With a little more rain than usual during the winter, their flowering did not get delayed like last year. No, my early pineapples are first year bloomers!
I swear I am not going crazy. The pineapple plants that came with the house have quadrupled in number over the years and I feel I have gained quite a bit of experience with them. In the past years, whether planting tops or pups, each plant would take about two years before it bloomed
That is not what is happening this year. I have a pretty decent number of two year old plants that are pushing their cone shaped flowers into the air. In addition to this I have at least three one year old plants (one pictured) that are doing the same.
We have 12 blooming pineapples at the moment! Thankfully at slightly different stages of development. I have been attempting population control, but I might have to set up a produce stand by the road!
Surprise tomato with nasturtiums behind and pineapples in upper right.
This year, I was determined. I was going to direct sow seeds into the garden beds in my back yard and grow something. I watered them every day and was rewarded, after an inordinately long time, with tiny little sprouty things. I planted nasturtiums, lemon balm, and lemon grass. I received nasturtiums and tomatoes.
Pretty amazing, right? Almost magic. After some head scratching and wondering if the seed company had somehow got it hilariously wrong I realized something. Besides the lemon balm and lemon grass seeds that didn’t sprout, I had unwittingly sown tomato seeds into the bed fresh from the compost heap I raided to amend the dirt.
I have fuzzy memories of watching a Martha Stewart episode, or some such, that talked about how to harvest tomato seeds for your own garden and it involved rotting the gelatinous protective shell of the seeds before they could be planted. Well, in a compost heap this happens naturally right? Now, I’m just as lazy a composter as I am a gardener, so I’m probably not doing something right, like creating an environment where a lot of heat is generated. I just throw fruit and vegetable waste on the heap and cover it with the leaves and grass clippings that are also on the heap. Nature does the rest. So now, I am half expecting random tomatoes in every amended bed. It adds some randomness.
I’ve drawn rooms and layouts for my house since we bought it. These are the most recent focusing on the garden and what I would like for it to do. Whether it will ever look as planned is yet to be seen. We tend to buy small plants, plant in small groups, and then neglect them a little. We don’t have an irrigation system, so growing a garden is slow going.
The back view of the house (second pic) includes the profile as it would be if the current patio were made into a Florida room (because Florida). And the Florida room would look like this:
I am stupidly happy that Google street view finally has a new picture of our house, one that doesn’t include the for sale sign and general junkiness, and …it was taken when we were freshly mowed! How awesome is that?!
We brought the pineapple in this weekend based on recommendations I had read to harvest it when it was 1/3 yellow and then allow it to ripen the rest of the way inside. I think this is primarily to make sure that we get to eat it, not the raccoons in the area. It’s more baby plant than fruit, but hopefully it will be good.
It is Summer in full blast here, but before Spring let go – not long ago- I was running out in advance of the lawn-mower every weekend to collect the wildflowers that kept popping up in the middle of the back yard. This is one day’s harvest; and they lasted longer than I expected them to.
I’m all about identification, so I looked them all up. I had been calling the blue ones irises, but really they are Common Spiderwort. The pink, trumpet shaped flowers would spring up within a day or two of a fresh mow and wave about a foot above the grass. They are Rain Lily, and are, apparently, attached to bulbs that will sprout new flowers every year. They also spread by seed. Next year I think I am going to grow our rain lily patch. The tiny pink flowers, Meadow Beauty, are still going strong on the water’s edge along with some other crazy grasses that grow in ground too wet to mow over.
