Pineapples: Florida’s Other Fruit

Queen pineapples require special covering techniques using grass to protect buds.

Pineapples don’t grow on pine trees or palm trees or underground as many people once thought. They grow, after careful tending and only in perfect weather, on spiky plants with a small yield. No wonder citrus has taken over.

Around the turn of the 20th century, the Indian River Lagoon was the world’s biggest producer of pineapples. Most of the million crates of pineapple shipped were grown along the scrub ridge of the Indian River. By 1956 Phillips Platts of Ft. Pierce, known as the Pineapple King, owned the only remaining commercial plantation in the county.

Phillips’ son Paul, formerly of Ft. Pierce and now of Edenton, North Carolina, remembers what it was like to work with pineapples.

Read the entire article in the September 2002 issue