By Matt Skoufalos
From Monday through Friday, Wes Harden is the director of imaging services for the 580-bed Lexington Medical Center in West Columbia, South Carolina. On the weekends, however, Harden makes the lengthy commute to his Florida home, not only to visit his family, but to tend his pineapple crop.
The veteran medical imaging professional has always had an abiding love of the outdoors. As a child, he spent long summers tending to his mother’s half-acre vegetable garden. In his 50s, Harden took up hunting, mostly for the moments of enjoyment listening to the forest awaken at dawn. But it wasn’t until he attempted to cultivate his own pineapple patch that Harden found himself really reconnecting to the earth in a novel way.
“I’m an outside guy, so when I’m not at work, I’m trying to find something to do that’s outside,” he said. “I started with one store-bought pineapple, cut the top off it, and buried it.”
“I just decided, ‘I want to see if I can grow one myself,’ he said. “It actually worked! So one after another, I planted two or three a year from the ones we’ve grown.”
Pineapples are a fairly easy fruit to grow, provided you have the right climate for it – and a great deal of patience. Their ideal environments range from 64 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, with a minimum winter temperature of 61. Although the shrub itself is fairly low-maintenance, a pineapple plant can take more than two years to bear fruit from a single cultivation.
“Some of them, after they produce, won’t produce pineapple, but will produce buds that produce pineapples,” Harden said. “I trim off the old stems; after a while, they get a little root-bound in the pot. I’ll take them out and put them in new pots and move things around a little bit.”
Harden’s 36 shrub plots can vary in fruit production – last year, they yielded 26 pineapples, the year before that, 31 – based on any number of factors, from weather to plant health to intrusion of disease or pests. But when it all comes together, the results can be impressive. Harden loves to share the pineapples he grows, and often brings them into work to deliver to coworkers. He enjoys seeing the reactions when they taste a fruit that’s often fresher, with a broader depth of flavor, than the kind they can buy in a store.
“I’ll still eat a couple handfuls a year, but I enjoy giving them away and telling people about them as much as I do eating them,” Harden said. “If you think about pineapples that you get in the store, they’re probably harvested two to three months prior. Mine stay on the vine up until you’re ready to eat them.”
“They’re brightly colored yellow because I leave them on there, and they’re so sweet; sweeter than any pineapple that you’ve ever tasted,” he said. “I’ve done nothing special other than leave it on the vine until it’s ready to eat. You lose so much in that transportation.”
Pineapples have long been considered an international symbol of hospitality; in bygone years, they were regarded as a symbol of wealth, owing to the expense required to cultivate and transport them globally, with hosts in the 1700s displaying pineapples as art objects at dinner parties until they rotted away. Harden’s pineapples are nothing so precious as that, but he delights in sharing them with friends, some of whom have begun to reciprocate.
“We gave away a pineapple plant to one of my wife’s coworkers, and she returned the favor recently,” Harden said. “When it produces fruit, the inside of the fruit, instead of being yellow, is supposed to be red. I’ve never seen a pineapple that’s red on the inside.”
When Harden’s not busy cultivating pineapples, he also enjoys tinkering with home improvement projects. His woodworking skills resulted in bedframes for his kids and his dog; his interest in tiling helped Harden transform a shower tub into a walk-in shower, with the help of YouTube tutorials and six weekends’ worth of labor. Next on the docket is a plan to create a kitchen on his patio, beginning next spring.
“I do enjoy other crafty things,” Harden said; “I like to find little things to keep me busy. To me, it’s definitely about balance. Five days a week I’m at work, but on the weekend, it’s about family, and it’s about getting your headspace correct; giving you something that forces you to take your mind off work.”
“You can’t be thinking about work when you’re running the table saw or cutting tile,” he said. “You’ve got to be focused on the task at hand. Family’s equally important in that mixture. If you’re focused on one thing, the other is not getting that attention. It’s finding the ability to bring focus back to those things; you hope at the end of your life you’ve got equal parts family, fun and work.”
Harden said he expects his balance will be recalculated in a few more years, after he steps away from his career in imaging. His wife of 33 years, Tracy, has begun raising her own herbs and peppers alongside them in the garden, and the couple are parents to 24-year-old twins who are at the outset of their professional lives.
Whether it’s pineapples or home improvement, however, Harden knows there’ll be something he enjoys spending his time doing at the end of his years of work. He also volunteers his time with the Association for Medical Imaging Management (AHRA), and believes in supporting health care radiology administrators as they progress into the kinds of roles he’s filled in the past nearly 35 years of his professional life.
“I’m part of the AHRA, and we definitely believe in growing the next generation,” Harden said. “I’ve got a few more years to work. I enjoy what I do, and enjoy the other things outside of work. When I retire, I’ll have something to do.”
