PINEAPPLES.
Once an irate commission merchant in a north ern city wrote a letter to a pineapple grower in southern Florida, charging him with sending second-rate fruit. The consignment contained many imperfect specimens. He threatened dire consequences if any more "windfall pineapples" came his way! The south half of Florida still laughs, though the joke is old.
The largest pineapple orchard in the United States is near Fort Myers on the West Coast. This tropical fruit is sensitive to cold and dry air. It grows only in the lower part of Florida. Even southern California has given up the attempt to raise it.
A field of pineapples ready to harvest does not look like an orchard. The plants grow in rows and hills, like corn, and each bears its one fruit on the stout central stalk, about a foot above the ground. Around it arch the long, thickened, sword-like leaves, very prickly on the edges, and at the tip. It would be a hurricane, indeed, that produced any windfalls of this crop.
The negroes that gather the "pines" wrap their legs up to the knees with the thickest cloth they can find. Strips of carpet are best. Then they put on mittens or gloves made of thick canvas, and go into the field with short, hooked knives, and gunny sacks slung across the shoulder, and hanging open under one arm. Grasping the spiny leaves at the top of the fruit, the harvester cuts off the stem at its base, and "chucks" the pine into his bag. The saw-like leaves scratch viciously at him as he passes on to cut the next ripe cone, and when he goes to empty his bag into the crates, distributed from wagons through the field.
Often I have seen the picker toss the fruits, as he picks them, to a man outside the rows, who catches them skilfully, and lays them in the crates. From the field, the filled crates go to the packing sheds, where each sound pine is put into a paper bag about its size, and closely packed in crates that are loaded onto cars or into vessels bound for distant cities. The processes are very simple, and the solid fruit ripens in transit.
New plantations are set with suckers, or offsets, that spring out around the base of the pineapple, or the stalk below it. The wild plant has seeds, but cultivation has discouraged seed-production. The seed-vessels become the fleshy substance behind the "eyes." In the best varieties, even the core is soft and luscious.
There is no more refreshing fruit in the world than ripe pineapples. But we must eat them in the field, or at least close to the place in which they are grown, because fully ripe ones are not able to travel; and those that are cut when less than ripe never attain perfection.
The native Floridian sits down to rest, and cuts the rough outside off of a big "sugar loaf," as a Yankee would peel an apple. Then he slices it across the bottom, and eats the slices, holding the uncut fruit by the leafy top. Does he eat a whole one? Bless you, he has only started in! One, two, or three are not too many to quench the thirst of a man. The Northerner gasps to see fruit that at home would cost over a dollar disappearing down the throat of a loafer who has jogged out from town to see how the harvest is coming on. Nobody chides him for coming.
Quantities of pines go north from the West Indies, whose climate produces fine fruit. Brazil, the native place of the wild pineapple, raises a con siderable supply for export. The cultivation of the fruit has spread to the Tropics of Africa and Asia. For a long time English gardeners have raised the finest kinds of this fruit in special hot houses built for the purpose.
The leaves of pineapple plants contain valuable fibre. We see it in the wonderful piria-cloth, im ported from the Philippines. The natives of the Islands of the Malay Archipelago also strip and wash out the fibre, using primitive comb-like tools of bamboo, and taking infinite pains. The attempts to invent a machine for getting out the fibre cheaply have failed, so far, in this country. So the leaves are cleared off and destroyed, at some expense and great inconvenience, to get ready for the next year's crop.