A REDLAND Bay man says there might be something in the water across the city after finding a pineapple without a leafy top growing in his garden.
Richard Butler, who has been growing pineapples for about seven years, said he wanted experts to look at the deformed piece of fruit so they could establish whether he had stumbled upon a world first.
He said he was shocked when he found the mutant fruit growing without its characteristic leaves among perfectly healthy pineapples in his yard.
He immediately showed it to a local fruit vendor who said he had never seen anything like it during his 60 years in the industry.
Mr Butler said he did not use chemicals on his fruit but believed the deformity could have been caused when he moved the plant from a pot on his patio to a bigger pot in his garden.
"I rarely spray poisons in the yard. All the pineapples get is a bit of blood and bone fertiliser and a bit of sea salt spray," he said.
"When it first came up I thought 'that looks a bit strange, it hasn't got a cone on the top of it like the rest'.
"I just thought I would let it keep growing and growing and it might eventually force itself out but it never did."
Mr Butler said he would be picking the pineapple soon to prevent possums and other vermin from getting to it.
He said he was hoping it tasted the same as his other prized fruit otherwise he will have wasted 12 months of growing time.
"When I pick them I like to leave them for three or four days before I eat them because then you can start to see the juice dripping out of them," Mr Butler said.
"It costs me nothing to grow them other than a little bit of fertiliser twice a year. Once I cut the top off I just replant them."
Mr Butler said he had approached the CSIRO hoping they could shed some light on the matter but they told him they did not deal with pineapples.
His friends were also sceptical and thought Mr Butler was telling a few tall tales.
"I said 'come around to my place and have a look for yourself' because you can't deny it once you see it," he said.
"The leaves haven't been cut off. You can see it has formed inwards. Once somebody knows about it you might get someone like a pineapple grower from up at Nambour that has acres and acres of pineapples saying what it is.
"It might happen, it might be a freak of nature or something that happens once in a blue moon.
"I only grow a few in the yard but they grow hundreds of thousands. They might get a couple a year, you don't know.
"Until someone opens their mouth and says something about it I'm saying it is a freak of nature."
The only thing that was bugging Mr Butler about the whole debacle was that he would not be able to replant the pineapple without its top.
"I'm hoping that if I cut a bit deeper, I can plant that," he said.
"You never know because if it is in the ground and it forms roots it might work."
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