Love your regular updates and pics. Keep ‘em coming!
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Of all the dragonfruits, the yellow skinned is the sweetest and the most addicting one to eat. They are more expensive at the store for good reasons!
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I have tasted fresh Yellow Pitaya (Hylocereus megalanthus) flown in from tropical Costa Rica for the annual Pitaya conference here in Irvine CA. Delicious! However, when it’s grown in southern CA the outcome tastes (by comparison) like bland melon. Consequently I prefer to grow H. guatemalensis and if I can find some, the sparse-bearing H. ocamponis.
Lucky!
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Richard, it must really like that spot(your side) 
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Somehow I found that the yellow Dragon fruits are much sweeter than the Red ones.
I’ve cultivated the yellow species (H. megalanthus) and cultivars in my climate (outdoors year-round) and found the taste to be poor compared to H. guatemalensis and H. ocamponis (both red fleshed), along with Thomson’s white fleshed cultivar of H. undatus.
I’ve also tasted H. megalanthus fruits shipped overnight from Costa Rica – and they were excellent – although different in flavor from the berry tasting red fleshed species above.
In addition I’ve tried H. polyrhizus (pink fleshed) and its hybrids and found them to be inferior to the two red-fleshed species above and tropically-ripened yellow dragon fruit.
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Is there any particular way to identify them before they fruit? I have a plant that I grew from the seed of a red-fleshed fruit I got from a local gardener a few years ago, and it has flowered a few times but appears to be self-infertile. In one instance, there were as many as five flowers blooming in one night, and I assisted with manual pollination during the wee hours, but all failed to set fruit. I would be interested in adding an additional variety to assist with cross-pollination, and some of the local nurseries do carry dragon-fruit plants (albeit not cheaply), but I hesitate to purchase a plant only to find out it’s the same variety or the wrong one to cross-pollinate my seed grown specimen, etc.
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Not really – although H. ocamponis is discernable due to it’s spines and H. megalanthus has some characteristics that set it apart. Interior color of the fruit can be deceiving too – not all red-fleshed species or hybrids taste the same (some are awful).
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That’s a shame, I suppose I’ll just have to chance it with one of the plants on sale at the stores then. Is H. ocamponis self-fertile? I doubt any of the places here would go through the trouble of bringing in anything more exotic like H. megalanthus so what they do have is more likely to be the most common/generic kind of dragonfruit. From what I can recall, the fruit that I obtained the seed for my plant from was pretty tasty, sort of a mild sweetness.
Typically H. undatus and nothing else.
What color was the flesh?
Yes. But you’ll need to have something nearby that is in bloom year-round so that the pollinators are present when the Hylocereus blooms.
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