I have a 3 year old dragonfruit vine that I’ve been overwintering in the basement (the last two years it was overwintered inside, but I moved and had to bring it down).
The basement has ranged from 45-55F most of the winter. It looked fine — albeit dormant — for most of the last few months, and I only watered it sparingly and maybe once a month.
Today I noticed that it is ridden with a soft brown rot that has, for other succulents/catci I’ve had, intimated rapid death. It’s all the way up the climbing vines, and on several (but not all) of the hanging ones as well.
Curious what others would do in this situation. My instinct is that anything brown and rotten is dead, and my focus at this point should be to cut anything that looks clean and try to propagate that. I’m sad to do so, because I was hoping this year I might get some fruit, and because I was happy with how high it was. But I’ll sacrifice those parts to save it overall.
I’m also confused, though, on which parts of salvageable — for example, some of the vines are brown at the tip and the base, with the middle section fine, so not sure what to do with that either…
Any pieces where the ends have majorly died/turned brown, you should cut them off. Parts where the center looks dead, (like the main stem it looks like) but is surrounded by good pieces, I would just keep an eye on it. The trunk of the dragonfruit is underneath all the fleshy green stuff, it isn’t necessarily dead just because its exterior is. It also has tons of aerial roots, so it should be fine.
To be safe, I would start a new cutting. Just take one segment that looks good and green and either root it in the same pot, in some water, or wherever you root stuff.
I would shave off all the black parts. But just cut it to the “bone” as that’s what the center looks like almost like a spinal column. I accidentally burned mine last October (forgot to open the greenhouse and it got too hot) but I simply cut off all the meat on the damaged sections and just cut off some top pieces which were damaged. It is growing beautifully ever since. They are super tough, just cut off the damaged parts and it will respond well.
I would santize the good looking parts, cut it to start a new and throw the rest away.
I’m trashing my entire collection this year and restarting once i get my greenhouse up again.
This time, i plan on putting it in a pot where i won’t have to repot for it to flower and fruit. Mine is doing the same thing and started in the greenhouse before we moved. It had 1 week without me going in there cause we were moving back and forth and mold/fungus took it over so quickly.
Okay, so: a few months later, I did this. My dragonfruit is still alive, and new bits are growing, but all of the green fronds, which were very thick with water last year, are now desiccated/tight looking.
Is this anything to worry about?
I did cut off a few piece of new growth to root just if something dies.
Can you show a photo of it? Hard to imagine exactly what you’re describing. It’s a stressful event for any plant even one as tough as this, so it will take a while to fully recover.
