How To Plant and Grow Pineapple

Pineapple (Ananas comosus), belongs to the family of Bromeliaceae. Pineapple plant and its fruit have food values, nutritional and health values and it is usually grown in raining season. Pineapple plants require careful management

Steps in cultivating pineapple

1. Pineapple cultivation involves site selection (it  requires sandy soil with lots of nutrients to thrive and the soil should be well drained). Test your soil to get its PH, water retention.
2. There are two ways to propagate pineapple – through sucker or crown.

• The sucker is a shoot out by the side of a pineapple fruit, which takes lesser time to mature, while
• The crown is the top of the pineapple, which takes longer time to mature.

3. Land clearing.
4. Land preparation (you also add manure and fertilizer to the soil to enhance growth).
5. Get specie suckers.
6. Dress each sucker and expose the roots in other to fasten the growth.
7. Space the plant by 2ft between each other.
8. Apply manure to enhance growth after three months (occasionally apply fertilizer).
9. In the absence of rain, irrigation system is needed to complement rain.
10. Always weed the farm.
11. Between 8-9 months you can artificially induce flowering.
12. It takes 12-14 months for pineapple to mature and another 5 months for a mature plant to produce a fruit.

If you are thinking of a profitable fruit crop to cultivate, think of pineapple.

image source: naijainvest.com