Modesto father, daughter bond over pineapples

For Modesto resident Stephen Brady, bonding with his son was easy. They watched football and baseball together and went golfing.

He tried the same activities with his daughter, Michelle, but she wasn’t interested and instead gravitated toward pastimes with her mom, such as shopping and cooking, Brady said.

“I was thinking for a while, ‘What could I do?’ because it’s important to have that father-daughter relationship,” Brady said.

When Michelle was 11 years old, she and her mother were cutting up a pineapple from the store. As her dad walked by the kitchen, he heard her say how neat it would be to grow one.

It easily could have been a fleeting idea long forgotten, but for Brady, “ding, there it was” – his bonding opportunity.

Brady and Michelle went to several nurseries for advice on how to get started. They got the same answer each time: “You can’t do that here.”

Pineapples are indigenous to South America and are grown in other tropical environments such Hawaii, but that wasn’t a deterrent to the Bradys.

They turned to the Internet for tips and three years later harvested their first pineapple, grown from the spiky crown of the one she and her mom had cut in the kitchen.

It looked like a pineapple, smelled like a pineapple, but tasted more like sugar cane. “We were trying to take it to my school’s harvest festival and we waited too long and it turned bright yellow, so all the flavor turns to sugar, so it was ... yuck,” Michelle said.

“The longer you let it ripen, the more sugar it builds up on the inside,” Brady explained.

Brady and his daughter had successfully grown roots from the crown in a glass of water. They’d transplanted it into a pot that consisted of a soil designed for tropical orchids and a topsoil to keep it sturdy at the base. They’d learned to wrap the plant in plastic and use bruised apples to release enzyme gas that takes the pineapple plant from flower to fruit.

But they had harvested too late.

Skip ahead three years: Today, Michelle is a 17-year-old senior at Beyer High School.

On Monday, she and her dad picked their first perfect pineapple.

“You want the top third of it to be yellow,” Brady said as Michelle cut the pineapple in the backyard of their northeast Modesto home.

They have to wait a week to eat it because, as they learned from the first harvest, the pineapple continues to ripen after it’s been plucked.

The experience certainly brought the father-daughter pineapple farmers closer together.

They spent countless hours moving the pineapple pot in and out of the house when temperatures dropped lower than 65 degrees or higher than 85 degrees, and ensuring that the plant had sufficient water during fertilization weeks.

In fact, they spent so many hours on the plant over the past six years that Michelle earned the distinguished State Degree from the Future Farmers of America program in which she participates.

They took the pineapple plant to Beyer’s harvest festival last week and “everybody was totally amazed, even the teachers,” Brady said.

Apart from the pineapple picked Monday, Michelle and Brady have three more on the way. Against all odds once again, those pineapples fruited through cross-pollination because of their proximity to one another.

Michelle is off to college next year at Simpson University, a Christian school in Redding, where she will study to be a special-education teacher.

Brady will have to tend to the pineapples solo while Michelle is away, but it’s clear their bond will withstand the separation. “This has turned out to be the best experience that I have ever had with my daughter,” he said.

This story was originally published November 4, 2014 at 2:37 PM with the headline "Modesto father, daughter bond over pineapples."