Pineapple plant - short and stocky

[tam91]

If I am remembering correctly, they did not use a padded envelope. I may not be remembering ok though, other members please correct me if I am wrong.

But if I do remember that right, perhaps that is the problem - as I think I've read on here that the post office change equipment in recent history. The other suppliers, whose seed I had no trouble with, came in padded envelopes.

I had ordered 9 varieties from TGS. 7 had poor germination - many varieties only 1 of of 6-10 seeds germinated, at best 3 out of 6-10 seeds. One other didn't ship, sold out. Another was the "incorrect" red brandywine, that I reordered from a different seller. So overall, I did not get any variety that actually worked out. I will save my own seeds, or re-order these varieties elsewhere next year.

I did germinate a total of 34 varieties - a few from trades, most from a couple other sellers (tville members) - other than 1 from a trade, they all germinated great, almost 100%.

I had these all in the identical conditions, same seed trays.

So I understand TGS is a reputable company, but something must be going on. The mail equipment is my best guess.

[pinklady5]

I got my plants from our local nursery. Never had a problem until this year. Wonder who is seed supplier is. I only have room for 6 plants. 3 are Beefmaster and 3 are heirlooms. Caspian Pink, Cherokee Purple and Pineapple. It's just not my Pineapple, all three of these plants have issues. All are short and frail in appearance and are all short in height too. My caspian pink has no flowers and my CP and Pineapple plants have one small fruit on each. Just don't know what happened this year.

[BigBrownDogHouse]

Originally Posted by pinklady5

I got my plants from our local nursery. Never had a problem until this year. Wonder who is seed supplier is. I only have room for 6 plants. 3 are Beefmaster and 3 are heirlooms. Caspian Pink, Cherokee Purple and Pineapple. It's just not my Pineapple, all three of these plants have issues. All are short and frail in appearance and are all short in height too. My caspian pink has no flowers and my CP and Pineapple plants have one small fruit on each. Just don't know what happened this year.

Hi Pinklady!

It's a little off topic but I am having the same issue with my hot peppers. In years past, I was actually known for being more of a "pepper" guy than a "tomato" guy. Friends would want some hot peppers and I could supply them with ziplocks packed with them.
This year I decided not to grow any hot peppers from seed because I had my hands full with about 100 tomato plants. I figured my local superstores would have my favorite sport pepper plants.
My local Meijers had Bonnie Tabasco so I picked up a bunch of those.

All those plants are really underperforming in my opinion. I've had them in since about the third week of May and I barely have any blossoms at all. Some plants have none.
The plants are still very short and the stems are very soft, meaning they have already needed to be stacked even at such a short height because othewise they would be laying on the ground. They don't even have any fruit to support and I have had to tie them up.

I've done a mad scramble to some stores the last few days to try and find some of my traditional sport peppers. I found some Bonnie Tabasco's at the local WalMart and the stems are very different. Very sturdy stems with sturdy leaves.
Not sure what the heck I got the first time around but the two batches of Bonnie Tabasco's are very different.

I'm not holding my breath on getting any hot peppers from my original plants anytime soon.
Hopefully the new ones I got will show them how it is done!

Next year, I will grow my own. Lesson learned!

Brian

[z_willus_d]

Well I finally got two solitary ripe fruits off my supposed Pineapple vine. It's been 3 or 4 days now since I picked them and no others have ripened since. The first had a nice 2" hornworm caving through the occluded backside -- chucked to the red worms. The 2nd is depicted in my pics. Both were about the same size, and are comparable to the numerous other mature green fruits on the vine. Now from everything I've read about the variety, these fruits are supposed to be much larger -- like over a pound:
http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/77347/

What gives? They certainly seem to exhibit the correct color. Any ideas? Flavor-wise, this one small fruit was mild and tasty on the blossom end but a touch under-ripe and mushy on the top.

[tam91]

Dunno, I don't even have flowers. Grr.

It does look about right in color - when I grew pineapple before, I didn't get huge fruits. They were very sweet and fruity tasting though.

My Pineapple tomatoes were about 1/2 lb. each. They were growing next to Mortgage Lifter and Brandywine Pink with fruits over 1 lb. each. The Pineapple plant took off and grew and blossomed faster than any other tomato plant in the garden, but produced smaller fruit than the others. Probably one half of the Pineapple fruit were severely deformed while the plants close by were producing perfect fruit. I got my plants from a nursery and probably won't grow them again. My red, pink, and dark tomatoes outproduced all of my bi color, yellow, and gold tomatoes with the exception of Hillbilly which was outstanding.

Ted

[Sun City Linda]

Originally Posted by tam91

If I am remembering correctly, they did not use a padded envelope. I may not be remembering ok though, other members please correct me if I am wrong.

But if I do remember that right, perhaps that is the problem - as I think I've read on here that the post office change equipment in recent history. The other suppliers, whose seed I had no trouble with, came in padded envelopes.

I had ordered 9 varieties from TGS. 7 had poor germination - many varieties only 1 of of 6-10 seeds germinated, at best 3 out of 6-10 seeds. One other didn't ship, sold out. Another was the "incorrect" red brandywine, that I reordered from a different seller. So overall, I did not get any variety that actually worked out. I will save my own seeds, or re-order these varieties elsewhere next year.

I did germinate a total of 34 varieties - a few from trades, most from a couple other sellers (tville members) - other than 1 from a trade, they all germinated great, almost 100%.

I had these all in the identical conditions, same seed trays.

So I understand TGS is a reputable company, but something must be going on. The mail equipment is my best guess.

I had the exact same experience with my TGS seeds this year. Really poor germination on all I dont remember how they were shipped. LInda

[z_willus_d]

Well, I just don't get it then. I must have got a bogus plant. Some dwarfed fruit variety.
Oh well.

[tam91]

So that's three of us reporting bad germination from TGS. That's unfortunate.

I hope TGS figures out what is causing this.

Last year was my first year to grow from seed. I was very disappointed to see how many varieties had very low germination rates. All of the seed had been purchased from three or four seed vendors including TGS. The TGS seed was no less viable than seed from other vendors.

I read about a technique to improve germination and gave it a try. My seed went from slow, 20% germination to almost 100% germination. I decided my problem was with insufficient fermentation of the seed and the technique worked. I also tried it on some seed I saved this year that was slow or low in germination. Some Jaune Flamme seed went from 0% to 100% germination.

You might want to give the technique a try with difficult to germinate seed.

Using a small clear container with a tight fitting lid, pour a small amount of household bleach into the container. Add the seed to the bleach. With the lid on the container, shake it vigorously for a few seconds. Remove the lid and pour an equal amount of fresh water into the container with the seed and bleach. Replace the lid and shake again. Allow the container to sit for thirty minutes after shaking. After thirty minutes, pour the bleach/water solution off allowing any floating seed to be poured out with the water. Fill the container with fresh water and shake again. Pour the water off and put the seed on a paper plate to dry.

I've planted seed when it was removed from the container and it germinated well.

Ted

[carolyn137]

Last year was my first year to grow from seed. I was very disappointed to see how many varieties had very low germination rates. All of the seed had been purchased from three or four seed vendors including TGS. The TGS seed was no less viable than seed from other vendors.

*****

And with the above I will agree, meaning that from feedback over the last 20 years or so the most important issue with seed germination is not a specific seed source, rather, it's the way that different folks use different methods to germinate their seeds.

To give you just one example, years ago when I first started making seed offers at GW, before that at AOL, I asked for germination feed back for varieties.

Everyone who requested a specific variety got the same seeds and for any one specific variety, from fresh seeds meaning seed produced in say 2000 and offered in 2001, the germination percentages ranged from 100% to yes, 0 %.

At another site a person was talking about doing seed germination with garden soil, just to add that in.

Even in my most recent thread here on varieties I sent out this past Jan you'll see huge differences and each person got the same seeds.

Most places I know do actual germination testing, whether they state so on the package or not. Often you'll see a packed by date but that says when the seeds were packed, not when they were produced.

There are two places I know of where no seed older than two years old is sold, which is quite a feat when it comes to growouts each year for seed production, and that's Sandhill Preservation and Glecklerseeds.

So I take germination rates with a huge grain of salt and with one exception b'c the situation was rectified, I can't think of ONE seed site that lists seed that is uniformly low germinating.

Ted, are you initially fermenting the seed and then trying to bump up germination rather than using bleach or comet or whatever as the initial treatment of seed?

The reason I ask is b'c it's known through the work of Dr. Helene Dillard what pathogens on the seed coat can be partially removed by fermentation and while there have been several threads at several places about what can be removed with initial bleach treatment no one has found ANY data to date.

Lastly, when in a bind I've taken seeds directly out of a tomato and sowed that seed and almost always have gotten 100% germination. But here where I live systemic diseases such as Fusarium, Verticillium and friends are not a problem, so I'm pretty safe in doing that.

Carolyn,

I'm bleach treating seed that has been fermented. I only treat seed that has demonstrated low germination after fermentation and drying. Another seed that improved after bleach treatment was my Black Krim this year. I germinate in the six cell packs. After fermentation, I got one seedling from six seeds. After the bleach treatment, I got six out of six.

I mashed a very ripe Black Cherry a couple of weeks ago and planted the seeds with some tomato pulp beside the growing plant. So far, I can't see that anything has germinated. I only wanted to see if planting some fresh seed with pulp would allow for some fermentation to occur with germination to follow. My extreme heat may be retarding "in the soil" germination because the soil forms a hard, dry crust.

I also don't believe the handling methods of the USPS is detrimental to the seed. When I dry seed, fermented or treated; it drys into a hard clump. I place the clump in my hand and vigorously crumble and rub the individual seeds from the clump. I can't believe the USPS is more harmful to my seed than my method of separation.

Ted

[piegirl]

My pineapple plants are extremely large - 6 foot, bushy, healthy looking and not one fruit. There have been quite a few blooms but we have had "heckish" weather with extremely high humidity. I have shaken the flower stems, etc, nothing. Temps are now lowering and we finally had some rain after 5 weeks of zero so maybe they will do something??? piegirl

[Alpinejs]

I have two pineapple plants and both are very vigorous, but no tomatoes on either one.They are well ov er six foot tall, but I wanted fruit not a wind break!!! The only non-producersof my 54 plants.

[z_willus_d]

Mine finally started to produce about a month ago. I've gotten around 20 small, yellow (turning to red-fared when ripe) fruits from the thick vines, all about the size of a small hacky sack. I'm not so happy with the flavor and texture though -- touch bland on the former and turning mushy as it ripens on vine or indoors. I'd rate them a 6 out of 10 for flavor, 3 being the better offerings in your local store, 9 being what I got from my sole four CP fruit, and 8.5 my sole three Brandy Sud. While I'm sure I'll continue to get a fair number of these small semi decent fruits through the remainder of the seaon, I'm fairly certain this plant will not be a repeat for my garden in coming years. I'll look to replace it with the black pineapple I think.