Let me tell you a story...
Where I live in Australia, if you went to the grocery store, you'll pay $15 a kilo for a dragonfruit (many places would call them a pitaya I believe). If they're a bit old, you might get lucky and pick them up for $12 a kilo!
With this in mind, we had a pre-COVID holiday to Cambodia, and, let me tell you. We were shocked! Dragonfruit's were plentiful - and were selling for a minimal amount. It seemed they were everywhere we went; you want breakfast? Have a dragonfruit with your eggs and toast. Walking down the street? A vendor offers you ten. Let me tell you, if you're a lover of this fruit, you need to go to Cambodia - if you eat enough of them, you'll nearly be able to pay for your flight ticket!
With that in mind, my thumb green wondered, how would I go about growing my own? Now, this has been a passion project - buying cuttings, watching them grow inch by inch, putting on the fertiliser - and then, in January, after years of waiting in hope - I finally got a single bud! The buds take about 30 days to open, so every day I would head out and measure it's progress with a crude measure - using a finger, and then a thong. And then it flowered - and withered... you can imagine the disappointment.
However, a month later, four little buds showed themselves on the plan. And these four buds have been growing and growing, and I wanted to let you see just where they're up to. They're still a way off coming into bloom - but ain't their odd shape delightful to see?
These are part of the yellow variety; my reds and whites and purples are yet to bud... dunno why, but we'll see. This time around, having four flowers, I'm feeling confident that I might get one fruit - and, at $15 a kilo, I'll feel like all those years have finally started to yield!
These two buds have come on next to each other, and you can see how uniform they are. The buds developed on the same day, and their growth is pretty much identical.
Dragonfruits grow by adding extra bits out of their ends - this tiny little end will ultimately stretch out about 50-60cm in length, before shooting another length of arm out of the end of him. It's rather a cool process. I caught this one with a lady beetle; ain't he cute?
Here's another one of my buds, you can see how the end kind of elongates and the bud gets longer and longer - hiding an incredibly large flower in its end.
The dragonfruits are such a cool plant, they tend to go off in all sorts of directions, around obstacles, around each other, over the ground, through the air - there is no real rhyme or reason to anything they seem to do.
Here's my fourth bud - again, you can see it's uniformity to the other three. While the flower will only last a day or two, I think they all developed at the same time, and will be all in bloom together. I wonder if this will help them pollinate and fruit. Dunno - but I've got big plans!
Stepping back, here's my dragonfruit setup - gives you an idea of the scale of those blooms - massive, eh? They're on the right side of the image. My yellow dragonfruit has quite skinny arms, you can see some of the other plants are far chunkier - hopefully, to hold more weight!
And can you believe this is the base which supports such a beast of a plant? The broken bit off to the side is where my first flower came through, obviously, it no longer remainds:
Thanks for joining me for my first post in this community, I do enjoy a good bit of gardening, and I hope to be ale to share more of what's growing!
Signed;
Nearly a Green Thumb
Tim