I Pitaya Fool Who Doesn't Grow Dragonfruit From Seed!

Whenever someone tells me that they're a black thumb, I often tell them to try dragonfruit.  Also known as pitaya, dragonfruit is a hemi-epiphytic cactus that produces large and tasty fruits with neon pink skin and a surprising white flesh that's peppered with tiny black seeds. These seeds are really easy to germinate, and the patient gardener will one day be rewarded with a fruit bearing plant of her own!
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(Special thanks to Matt's Landscape for the photographs of the fruit.)  Most pitaya begins life as a cutting from a named variety.  While rooting cuttings is the fastest way to get your own fruit, seeds are also very easy to start, not to mention incredibly rewarding!  Each fruit has hundreds of seeds, and almost every one of them has the potential to someday become a fruit bearing vine.  Almost every single one of the seeds I planted have sprouted, and each of those seedlings is doing wonderfully to this day.  Although you can get special mixes for this sort of thing, I simply used potting soil.

The big pot to the left contains the seedlings that have just sprouted!

The tiny seedlings emerge with two glossy leaflets, and the stems will slowly begin to grow in their community pot until they need to be divided!

Not only have they gotten lanky, new offshoots have begun to form at the bases of the stems!  I gently untangled the mass of cacti and potted most of them up individually.

I've left some in the community pot, and they're just itching to get planted where there's some sun!  Even though they do well in the shade, they'll never flower on my shady balcony and will eventually have to be trained up trellises in large containers in a warm and sunny spot.  To the left is a full grown and trellised specimen.

For cheap (but run of the mill) hylocereus cutting, look no further than a commonly available grafted neon cactus!  The rootstock is, you guessed it, dragonfruit cactus.  Remove the tacky pink gymnopetalum cactus from the top, repot the rootstock in humus rich soil, and voila! You'll get dark green dragonfruit stems before you know it. 

Since the folks at Matt's Landscape were nice enough to let me share some photos, here are some of the varieties that you can purchase as cuttings!  Growing from seed is fun and all, but its also nice to get a fast growing start of some unusual named varieties like these...

This variety has sexy pink flowers!

Can you think of any good reasons NOT to grow dragonfruit?
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