Northland
Wendy Laurenson visits a pineapple farm near Whangārei.
So it’s a surprise to find a hillside smothered with ripening pineapples near Whanga¯ rei as we head into the winter months. It’s here that Owen and Linda Schafli are harvesting their first commercial pineapple crop of between 5000 and 10,000 pineapples from their 22,000 plants.
Owen Schafli grew tropical fruit in South Africa before moving to New Zealand with his wife Linda and their young family in 2008. “After a few years in Hamilton, we bought these 6.8 hectares at Parua Bay to grow mainly bananas and pineapples, but we’re also experimenting with other tropicals such as dragonfruit, papaya, sugarcane and coffee.”
The property was mostly in regrowth bush and gorse around a river basin with nearly half of it in QEII Reserve, so they gradually cleared and planted pockets of several banana varieties, and trialled pineapples on mounds on their higher ground. “Bananas have been our cash crop but we don’t have enough plantable land for them to be commercially viable,” Owen says. ”We decided to focus on pineapples once we knew they consistently fruited well here. They make the best economic use of our small sloping property.”
Part of their success has been down to their choice of the pineapple variety ‘Queen’, a small gourmet fruit that is sweet and deep golden yellow with an edible core. “It’s an old cultivar still grown in India, South Africa and Australia for fresh fruit rather than canning. It has better tolerance of cold, disease and stress than ‘Cayenne’, the main variety imported here,” Owen says.
“‘Cayenne’ is well-suited for large scale harvesting and processing because the big fruit fit the cans with little waste,” Linda explains, “but they’re usually sprayed to induce uniform flowering and harvest times, then picked unripe and gas-ripened for fresh fruit export. We chose ‘Queen’ to give Kiwis the option of a super sweet, locally grown pineapple that is spray-free and available nearly year round.”
It’s taken seven years for Owen and Linda to build up numbers of their ‘Queen’ from suckers. “We bought the first ones from a friend who was growing them in a glasshouse, and once we knew they did well here, we started to build up plant numbers and prepare the ground.”
Pineapples will grow from suckers that sprout from the side of a mature plant.
When the Schaflis were making use of every small sucker, the new plants took two to four years to flower but Owen says that has now halved because they can start with larger suckers. “It takes a further few months from flowering until a pineapple is mature. One plant can have two to four pineapples a year for several years if well managed. The spiky topknot can also be cut off and planted, but they’re slower to grow and fruit than a sucker-grown plant.”
Plants like light, warmth, protection from frost and rich, slightly acid, free-draining soil. “They’re in the bromeliad family so they like humidity and are slightly more cold hardy than bananas, but they hate wet cold ground,” Owen says. ”I’ve handrotavated our sloping lower blocks then made mounded rows for planting. We plant the suckers straight into the mounds in October when the ground has warmed up and we frost cover some of the lower blocks during the cooler months.”
Pineapples need enough moisture for the developing fruit to fill out and mature, and they don’t like competition from weeds. However, despite their prickly leaves, pineapples are reasonably easy to harvest and they have a good shelf life. “From late summer to early winter, we wait until the fruit is fully orange before picking,” Owen says. “But in August and September, we pick as soon as there is a bit of orange, to prevent the core going brown. Then the pineapple colours up in about a week.”
The Schaflis can see that there’s fastgrowing demand for locally grown tropical fruits. “We’re investigating supplying pineapples to local restaurants and cafes, and later may look at other outlets around the country. People are really enthusiastic about exploring new food options we can grow here in Northland, and we encourage anyone to experiment at home.” ✤
More info on growing tropical fruits on the website, tropicalfruitgrowers.nz.