I’m a member of the glasshouse and Kitchen Garden teams. In the last week, I have been working on re-stocking the pineapple house with 40 new pineapple plants, of the variety ‘British Queen’, which are all already fruiting. The Pinery/Vinery was restored in 2007, to re-introduce pineapple production to Tatton, a traditional feature of the kitchen gardens.
Unfortunately, due to the extreme winter we lost all our previous crop in January and February. We’re hoping we’ll be harvesting some fruit from these new plants by the autumn. This is a good time to crop them because, by then, they will hopefully have reached their full size and will taste at their best.
The plants have been potted up and then plunged into the pineapple pits in the Pinery/Vinery. The bed consists of fermenting oak leaves that provide bottom heat to generate root growth. This is a traditional method – others use ‘tanner’s bark’, but this does generate a lot of heat and can be hard to regulate, whereas oak leaves provide a more uniform heat around the pots.
The idea is to produce good pineapples rather than just growing them. This means, we need to pay attention to watering and ventilation, and ‘damping down’ (sprinkling water across the paths, walls, glass and misting over the top of the pineapples themselves). All three things are important and need to be in balance in order to produce a good fruit. This is something I will be checking on a daily basis during my working days.
John Hoxworth, Craftsman Gardener
