Thought some might like to hear about my experience trying to grow Dragon Fruit in a colder climate. I grew 2 different plants in a pot in zone 6a.
I grew them for about 5 years. I bought one from Logees of a variety called Edgar‘s Baby, and the other was sold to me as a yellow dragon fruit. I don’t remember where I got it exactly, but it came from some online shop. These came as smallish cuttings (the Logees one was larger). Being in a colder climate I was moving these outside for the warmer weather and growing them inside under LED grow lights over winter. The first year I had it I did not have any kind of humidifier and the inside humidity at some points in winter was quite low, in the teens. Since then I got a cool mist and have been able to keep the humidity usually around 50. In the winter I give it a very small amount of monthly fertilizer. In the summer I give it more. I have slowly potted it up from 1 gallon to 2 gallons pots, then I bought large plastic containers (I’m guessing about 15 gallons), which I attached a wooden board through the bottom and built a support system on. I put a couple bricks in the bottom of the pots before filling them with cactus soil in an effort to balance the weight of the pot.
Observations -
These are basically cacti and also vines. The spines on them are not that long and not nearly as bad as most cacti I have encountered, but still capable of scraping you up if you aren’t careful. The plant itself is very interesting and makes a good conversation piece.
They grow fast. Before too long they become large and heavy, and a real job to move in and out of the house. When growing inside under grow lights the growth is thin and spindly. Obviously they needed better light than I could provide in the winter, but I could just remove that growth in the summer and the new growth outside was thick and healthy looking.
I never had any pests bothering them and they survived over wintering with ease. A fairly carefree plant as far as indoor tropical plants outside the tropics go. They are also very easy to propagate, virtually any cutting I took and put in soil became a new plant. I had so many easily obtained cuttings that I planted several directly outside for fun one year. They looked interesting and grew well until autumn when they promptly died, as expected. I thought that if these plants were more cold hardy they spread so easily they would conquer the world.
I ultimately decided to stop growing them for a couple reasons:
- In 5 years I never once got a flower. These were huge plants, I’d estimate they could easily have weighed 50 lbs each, but not one flower, thus no fruit.
- They became very top heavy, which made them a nightmare to move in and out. I don’t need someone getting crushed by a heavy cactus. I’m physically limited and needed to get people to help me move them, which every year seemed like a more ridiculous ask.