How to Grow Dragonfruit (Pitahaya) Pt. 2: Tying Up and Taking Cuttings

What's going on everyone? Kevin here from Epic Gardening. So it's been about four months I want to say since the dragon fruit update. And as you can see, what once was a tiny little plant has gotten a little out of control. And if I'm totally honest with you, I haven't been keeping up with it as much as I would have liked. So I'm going to see what I can do to analyze the growth, talk about next steps and potentially try to train this upwards just a little bit, which is reminiscent of that classic way that it's grown for commercial scale production in Southeast Asia. So stay tuned. So let's take a look at this plant and what's actually going on. It's actually two plants like you can see here and the growth has been insane. So when I first transplanted it, we had this and this on this plant only. And then on this side over here you had this one and then this one right here. And so clearly we've gotten one, two over here, as well as two offshoots that even are starting to grow a little longer over here. And then finally on this one, you've got all sorts of offshoots coming out. You've got this one here, this one, this one, then this one has produced a split. And so it might be getting a little unruly, but I don't want to prune these off in advance of, ow, that's actually a little spiky, in advance of the fruiting season, which hopefully will come at least a little bit this year. I know I'm not going to get a crazy yield this year. So what I'm going to try to do before it's too late is slowly bend some of these upwards and train them to this, which I may even need to reinforce with something a little more heavy duty like this. So if you guys remember, my roommate wanted to compete with me on the dragon fruit challenge. So safe to say he may have been neglecting these a little bit, but at least he has them trained upwards. So he did something right that I didn't do right or basically I just forgot to. So what he's done is he secured them with cloth and he's just tied them straight across. So at least he has a nice upright growth that he can then let fall down. I don't have that. And so that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take this old shirt that my friends hate that I wear and I'm going to cut it up and we're going to see if we can train it up to a vertical. So what I'm going to try to do is slide in a couple extra bamboo poles here for extra support, but I want to give it some water first to loosen up the soil so I don't just jam it in there and damage any potential roots. I guess I could be damming them too to a life of destruction. But what I've been doing feeding wise is I haven't really been fertilizing this. However, I do give it about an inch of water per week cause it's just outside of the ability to capture rain on this patio. And so I actually do have to manually water this. So we're going to let this soak in and then we're going to see if we can slide a couple more of these bamboo sticks right down there for support. Okay, I've got one in. We'll put one more in just because I know these can get pretty heavy and I'm putting it down in the center. I know there's not roots there just because of the way that I planted it. So we should be good to tie it up. All right, so this is not something I would recommend because I should have done this sooner. Basically when let's say this one started to grow and then when this one here and these two started to grow, that's when I should have started to pull them upwards. So if they go too long, if they mature too much, they're going to harden and it's going to be really hard to tie them even with this cloth here. So what I'm going to do is just very gently see if I can get them closer towards the center. I may even need to do it in an iterative process over time. But I don't know, fingers crossed. And you know what? If I break any of these, it's not a big deal. They're easy propagators. And if anyone wants a cutting that I accidentally break off, if it happens, I will give a cutting to you guys. The first person to pre-order my book, epicgardening.com slash book. If I break one, we'll get the cutting mailed straight to them. All right? So wish me luck or I guess don't if you want a cutting for yourself. Let's see how this goes. Success number one. And you know what? My friends are going to be happy I'm getting rid of this shirt too because I get so much trash talk about the shirt that I wear that I finally just decided, you know what? Let's cut it up and let's use it in the garden instead of wearing it and having my friends hate on it all the time. Okay, I'm going to go for these corn, these joints where the each new stem piece comes out. Tie this one up. It's not going too bad guys. Okay, let's keep going. This one I am a little less enthusiastic about. I think what I can do first is tie the base to the pole. Let's get it around this way. It's actually pretty spiky. The older these stems get, the spikier they get. So you got to be careful here. Okay, so now what I can do is I'll get the tie prepared and then I'll move the entire plant up. There we go. Dedication to the cause. Going in with the teeth. Okay, so that part is tied up and I'm actually seeing a little stress on this. I'm actually seeing a little stress on this one prior. So let's go ahead and change angles here. So these are actually much bendier than I thought they would be because I thought they might be a little bit too mature, but they're okay. So thankfully I think we're going to be able to get most of these up if I can thread the needle here and not spike myself out of control. Let's go ahead and tie this guy up. Starting to look like a little Frankenstein's monster over here, isn't it guys? Okay, this one I'm really hoping wants to go back the other way because there's a lot of stress on this joint right here where the new stem piece comes out. So what I'm going to try to do is tie it right above this next stem piece where the double headed is coming out, which I think is going to work. So, all right, so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to slide this just like this. Use the cloth to pull it up very gently cause we definitely don't want this one to break. And then we're going to tie it as close as we can. And as soon as you get the actual tie, you can use the friction to pull it up just like that. And that's not the best job I've ever done in my life. But like I said, I'm doing this later than I would want to. And so I'm having to deal with imperfections in the pruning and the tying up. So let's go ahead and secure that as tightly as I can. There we go. And I am definitely going to have to, I'm definitely going to have to secure this in another fashion cause it's getting to be too heavy cause this bamboo is just simply not enough. So what I might end up doing is I might put a stake here and run it up once this starts to grow. This is going to become the main growing tip. So I'm going to put a stake here eventually and run straight up to here. And so eventually it'll start falling out over the balcony here. But for now this is going to be okay. And now we can talk about some of these lower sections. So it doesn't look pretty, but it's going to do for now. What I'm going to do is probably come through and shore this up. I'll trim some of these pieces of cloth off because I don't want it to look totally disgusting. But these two, you might be saying, okay, well you didn't do those. Well I decided that I've got quite a bit of growth up here and these ones are pretty rough. They're coming out of a lower portion of the stem. And so it's going to be really difficult for me to bend them upwards. They're probably going to break anyways. So what I'm going to do is show you how to take a dragonfruit cutting. So dragonfruits are known for how easy they are to propagate from cutting. And so what you want to do is you find the stem where the stem joins to another piece of the stem, come through with extremely sharp clippers. These are some Fiskars or sorry, there's a Felco 2 pruners. So I'm going to come through and just do a very simple, and you can see this is where the eventual roots are going to come out of. I'm going to do the same thing here, coming through targeting that stem connection. Boom. There we go. And we're pretty much good to go there. So we've got it all tied up. I've pruned off these extra cuttings. And the only other thing I'm going to talk about today at least is fertilizing. So we're pretty far away from any blooms or flowers coming off of this plant. So I think it's safe to give it a nitrogen heavy fertilizer, just basically something where the N is higher than the other two. It's going to spur on more vegetative growth, the stem growth that we want. And so we'll see in a future video what I end up deciding to do for that. But what we're going to do with these two, like I said, I said if I broke them off I would give them away. Well I cut them off and I'm still going to give them away. So like I've been saying in some of my other videos, my book's coming out. It's coming out May 7th. It's called The Field Guide to Urban Gardening. And it's going to be all about doing stuff like this, like growing in containers, growing in these raised beds you see over here. Practical beginner's tips for starting a garden, even if you don't have a lot of space. So the first two people to go to EpicGardening.com forward slash book, in America, I can't ship these internationally unfortunately, in America, the first two emails to hit my inbox after this video comes out with the instructions having been followed on EpicGardening.com forward slash book, I will send one out to you. And if not, you still get a free pack of seeds if you pre-order the book. So it's still a cool deal. All right guys, let me know what you want to hear in future dragonfruit videos. I will see you in the next one. Good luck in the garden. Keep on growing.