(ambient music)
- Wow.
(ambient music)
Oh my gosh.
Look at that.
(upbeat music)
What's up everyone, I'm a proud plant parent right now
because this is my dragon fruit
coming to fruition quite literally.
It is ripening up.
We're about to, in this video,
talk about the conclusion to what is now
a five or six part "Growing Dragon Fruit" series.
So thank you so much for everyone who's joined.
We're going to learn some things that happened
during the fruiting phase.
'Cause we talked about blooming in the last video
and we're gonna go ahead and open this up and taste it.
And then I'm gonna summarize my entire year
plus dragon fruit growing experience
with this one plant, with some tips and tricks
to help you get the best dragon fruit
that you can possibly get
in the shortest amount of time.
So let's go ahead and get into it.
So here is our most mature one.
You can see there's a little bit of suns scald on it,
but it has really started to redden up.
It looks amazing.
And so just by giving that brief little squeeze here,
it's getting a little softer,
but I think it needs one more day
'cause I'm still seeing just not quite enough redness.
Here is child number two.
Again, this one is gonna be a couple days
behind the other one because it bloomed a couple days,
you can see there's more green on this side.
And then our third one here is still right on the verge.
It's reddening up on the bottom
but the top is still quite green, so we've got some time.
You can see that I've battled,
definitely battled some pests,
and there actually has been some cactus rust
and suns scald here.
You can see there's some blistering from just too much sun.
So I treated that with a little bit of neem oil.
And it's really kind of cleared it up,
it's not completely better
but it's as good as it's going to be.
And since these are the only fruits that I'm getting
off of it this year, which I'm very stoked about,
I'm okay having these stems get a little bit of disease.
We're a couple hours away from a storm.
And so my boy Richard over at Grafting Dragon Fruit
said as soon as rain starts coming in,
especially as you move into the winter,
the ripening process just stops.
And we're almost at the point
where it's time to harvest anyways.
So I'm gonna crack open the epic harvest apron.
We're gonna grab our pruners,
and we're gonna take
our two final dragon fruit children off.
And in this video, we're talking not only about the harvest
and the tasting, and some final thoughts,
but what did I do in this entire dragon fruit saga
to get my dragon fruit to produce so quickly,
as well as some things that you should be doing
for next season to prepare your dragon fruit to do well.
We want to take off as little
of the stem material as we possibly can.
So I'm gonna come through
and try to just be really precise about this, hopefully.
It's kind of hard to get in there though.
And we'll do that, and we will do that.
That should give us our dragon fruit.
There we go.
What a moment, what a moment.
(soft music)
There, (shears clipping) there.
Look at these, wow.
Now, while we could eat these fresh off of the plant,
in my opinion, the flavor's improved by chilling them.
So let's toss season in the fridge
and we'll come back in a little bit and see how they taste.
Okay. The moment of truth is here my friends,
we are slicing in to the homegrown dragon fruit.
This is such a satisfying moment.
Let's go ahead and get into it.
Oh my gosh.
Look at that.
It does not get any better than that right there.
For tasting purposes, what I think I will do
is slice in like this, and then just peel away
at the skin which comes off so easily.
Look at that, so incredibly easily.
And we are going to slice this up.
(knife knocking)
So I think one thing people do wrong
when they taste dragon fruit is,
this is a plant that you really wanna eat cold.
So bon appetite.
Let's go ahead and try this for the very first time.
Homegrown dragon fruit,
we've been on this journey for 14 months.
Wow. Oh my God, first of all, that's extremely juicy,
like money dragon fruit are.
But the flavor, which I don't expect to be very sweet
on the white varieties,
the yellow skin varieties are typically sweeter,
is was extremely sweet.
I'm really surprised at that.
That is way less, more of like a bland kiwi.
Everyone calls the white dragon fruit flesh
with the red skin,
this particular one right here, a bland kiwi.
Not to me, not this one that I've grown myself,
so pretty stoked about it.
So what really made the biggest difference
in growing this dragon fruit?
Remember when we first planted it,
we had stem cuttings maybe up to here and here,
not that big at all.
And typically it takes around two years to get fruit,
so how did I get fruit in 13 months?
Well, the very first thing you're looking at right here
is this massive, massive container.
You gotta go with a big container.
You wanna put it in its forever home as quickly as you can.
I don't even know how many gallons this is,
it's at least two feet wide in diameter.
I would guess it's at least 25 gallons, if not 35.
So that is the first thing is, is the container size.
The soil is really important.
A lot of people are gonna just throw cactus mix in there.
It does well with the mixture of native soil
and rich organic matter potting soil.
So maybe like 50/50,
you can throw in a little cactus mix if you want.
I think what I've recommended in the past
is maybe 10%-20% cactus mix
up to the 50% mark of potting soil.
And then you can just do half
of your native top soil, does perfectly,
perfectly fine in that.
The other thing I would say is location is everything.
So once it grows in like this, you remember,
in some of my earlier videos, I had to redo the trellis
and just tie it up in all these different ways.
If you build a dragon fruit trellis straight
out of the gate, my friend Richard
at Grafting Dragon Fruit has a fantastic video on that.
Then you won't have to do what I did,
which is re-trellis it over and over, and over again.
And it'll just grow exactly how it's meant to grow
and really maximize its sun exposure
which allows it to photosynthesize more,
which allows it to grow more.
And so that's what I would say is,
get your trellis and your placement right,
full sun, maybe not absolutely full,
in the hottest parts of the year
there can be some suns scalds.
But besides that, those are the Holy Trinity,
big container, perfect soil, great access to sun
with a nice trellising system.
We've had quite the ride this season with the dragon fruit.
I wanted to talk about four things
that you should be considering
when you've gotten your fruit.
It's the end of the season and you want to prepare
and protect your dragon fruit for the next season.
So the first thing I've got is a little bit
of topsoil to add as a top dress,
and then we're gonna mix in some fertilizer.
So we're gonna add this and we can then spread this around,
but what we want to mix in before we spread it around
is some kind of high nitrogen fertilizer.
You can use something like this.
I really like the Down To Earth Feather Meal.
It's a 12-0-0, so pretty high nitrogen.
We're just gonna take a scoop of that and mix it in.
And what's nice about it is, it's an organic fertilizer
which means it's gonna be slow release.
It's gonna take some time for this to break down.
So I'm gonna sprinkle just a quarter cup of this in here.
At the end of the season, we'll mix this in
and then we'll talk about how to protect the dragon fruit.
(upbeat music)
So our next protection step as we move
into the end of the season, into winter,
is to try and ward off any cactus rust, disease or pest
with a nice light coating of neem oil on all of the stems.
You can see some of these stems here
have looked a little better.
There's definitely some sun scald and blistering
which is leading to some rot
which I may need to cut away or even prune entire stem off.
But for now, we're just gonna give it
a light coating of neem oil to protect it.
(upbeat music)
So the last thing to worry about
is protection from both rain and cold.
So watering wise, you'll wanna tape your watering
down to twice a month at most,
all the way down to once a month,
if it is extremely, extremely wet,
or just doesn't need water that much.
As far as protecting from cold,
if you have it in a container that's able to be moved,
then you can definitely bring it indoors.
It does not want survive snow, frost, freeze,
it's not gonna have a good time in those situations.
So if you can bring it in, that's great,
if you can't, you may wanna wrap it
with a frost blanket a couple times
to give it at least like 5, 6, 7 degree boost in temps
for a little bit of protection.
But really, that's it as far as the dragon fruit goes.
It's for in an incredibly fun series,
this is the longest series I've done
on the Epic Gardening Channel.
And I love you guys following along.
It's been amazing.
So if you have any other questions that you wanna learn
about dragon fruit, let me know in the comments down below.
If there's other topics you'd like to see me cover,
of course, let me know.
And then my friend Richard Lee, over
at Grafting Dragon Fruit has been an incredible resource
to me in growing my very first dragon fruit
in just 12 months.
So check his channel out as well.
But until next time, good luck in the garden
and keep on growing all.