Has anyone tried to grow one of the Epiphyllum (orchid cacti) for fruit?
I’ve read that the flavour of the berries does resemble dragon fruit for some species.
They say that E. anguliger (fish bone cactus) and E. guatemalensis (curly locks) are well tasting.
At this moment I grow one E. guatemalensis and have some seeds of E. phyllanthus that I’m planning to sow. Unfortunately my E. guatemalensis hasn’t flowered yet, so I can’t confirm any of the claims about its flavour.
in my humble opinion, compared to dragon fruit, epiphyllums have a much larger gene pool, so there’s potential for a superior tasting fruit. several years ago i tasted an epiphyllum fruit that was so good that i felt bad eating the seeds. so i reluctantly put the fruit down and extracted the remaining seeds, which i sowed.
right now i have a few seedlings pretty close to blooming size.
earlier this year i purchased 10 acres of old orange grove in central florida. visited a couple months ago for the 1st time and planted some seedlings of my fig hybrid (ficus opposita x carica) to test their resistance to rkn. also made a couple dozen epiphyte bundles that i attached to trees and sowed a bunch of epiphyllum seeds on. i plan to select for fruit quality.
Haven’t had one before, but now you got me interested! Most cacti fruit that I have all have a similar taste. So far the best I have had is Queen of the Night fruit (Selenicereus grandiflorus), which was sweeter than the different dragonfruits albeit alot smaller and spikey.
i have 4 one red one florescent blue red purple and one white . i didn’t think they fruited . im wondering if i can use their pollen to help my halley’s comet bloom…
What an amazing project! If I were to live in a similar climate or had a large greenhouse I would do something similar. That’s something that also came to my mind when I was watching a video of a large greenhouse once.
Do you know which species you tasted the fruit of by the way?
here’s a pic of the fruit, and in the comments u can see a pic of the plant in flower. pretty sure it’s a disocactus hybrid of some sort, as the fruit was rather fragrant, something i’ve noticed even more so with hybrids with a higher percentage of disocactus in them.
Interesting, I didn’t know about the Selenicereus grandiflorus. Is it an easy houseplant?
Unsure, but I doubt it. It is a climbing cactus, very similar to dragonfruit, but less then a inch around. We have it growing up an oak tree, but I have seen it growing on all sorts of things. Ours is probably close to 100ft long if you stretched it end to end, at one point it bridged from one oak to another and grew all through the branches. That was a few hurricanes ago, the canopy is a lot thinner now. Below is a picture of the pieces that fell out of the tree this year. The little white floofs are the start of the flowers.
Edgar Viadavia used to get his emphiditems to Fruit crossing them with dragon fruit. there is a video somewhere i lost track of the whole community when my mom had her heart attack then covid hit and then her cancer diagnoses. but i would ask him about it he is in california and amazing man And a Plant breeder . he bred a Quince with an apple and they are edible out of hand .
