The Spiteapple Gets a Trim

If you've been here a while, you know about the Spiteapple. If you're new, the short version is: pineapple grown from a top, started during one of the harder chapters of parenting, named for what it became when that chapter ended. It fruited this winter. I cried a little. We moved on.

The longer version is here.

So. Update.

Spiteapple with freshly trimmed leaves - some of them still showing burns.

The leaves on the plant proper and the leaves on the fruit both show damage.

While I was otherwise occupied — dealing with a friend situation that turned out poorly, a property management company that was trying to make me pull each hair out individually, and the general weight of a week that had decided to be A LOT — the SO had the carpet replaced. Practical man. Good instincts. He looked at the Spiteapple, which is large and unwieldy and takes up more real estate than it probably should, and decided it would enjoy some time outside while the work got done.

He meant well. He told me he was doing it. I was distracted enough that I said okay and didn't think much further than that.

This plant is an indoor/outdoor situation normally — inside for the winter, outside when it warms up. Except this year, mid-fruit, I'd made the call to keep it in. Figured the stability was worth it.

A couple of mornings of northern exposure — not even the brutal afternoon stuff, just the polite morning kind — and it came back looking like it had been somewhere it absolutely should not have gone. Yikes.

The leaves told on it immediately. That particular bleached-out yellowing along the edges that means one thing and one thing only: too much, too fast, for a plant that had no frame of reference for any of it. Cocktail dreams smashed?

I saw it the day after I got home, because the day I got home I was pooped and didn't have the bandwidth for a plant assessment. When I did look, I did what you do — trimmed the worst of it, sighed a little, moved it into the plant room for steadier humidity and some TLC after its ordeal.

The fruit, for the record, is unbothered. Still spiteappling. Completely unaware that anything happened, doing exactly what it was going to do regardless.

The Spiteapple still Spiteappling.

Which is, honestly, on brand. Cocktails still on. Nice.