How to Grow Dragonfruit Part 3: Inducing Flowering

So guys, it's been five days and I did not expect this at all. I didn't expect that my changes would have such an immediate impact. What's up everyone? Kevin from Epic Gardening here. We're hanging out with the dragon fruit. There have been two videos about the dragon fruit so far. This video is taking a look after a few more months of growth and seeing can we make some changes in our care of this plant to potentially induce flowering. It's September right now. The flowering and fruiting phase is coming to a close and I want to see if there's a potential to even get one flower off this dragon fruit in its early life. Now if you remember the early video, I planted from two small cuttings and you'll see over here in the corner what those look like in October of last year and then it's grown considerably since then. So we're going to make some changes. Stay along with me. If you have trouble with your dragon fruit flowering, we're going to go through some things that might be an issue and we're doing a live test on this dragon fruit right here. Our first issue could be fertilization. And so what we're going to do is add a little bit of organic feather meal, which is a high nitrogen fertilizer around the base of this plant. And then we're also going to water in with a high phosphorus and potassium liquid organic fertilizer. So we're going to give it a nice deep drink. And throughout the growing season I've been watering this twice a week in summer because you know it is a cacti but it does prefer a good amount of water. This is a really large pot so I'm going to let it kind of sink in a little bit and we're going to wait and water again. So I call it the water, wait, water technique just to make sure that you're not straight up pouring water through a soil medium. You want to let it absorb and then you come in with a little bit more of a water. But what we're going to do is just we're going to make sure that we give it a nice little boost of fertility during the growing season, especially with a little bit more phosphorus and potassium because we want to make sure that it's going to put out flowers or at least give it the opportunity to put out flowers. So now that we've given our dragonfruit a nice healthy water, a little boost of fertility, we have to look at how the plant has grown. So one thing that dragonfruits tend to like as far as their traditional cultivation is growing them up a stake or a trellis and then letting them fall down. And so I've done a bit of a hybrid of that approach here. So I've got a stake coming up, but as soon as it hits my balcony railing, I just let it fall down because that's the economics of my space and that's probably what's going to work better. And so these stem pieces that are closer towards the sun and getting a little more sun access, those are the ones that are more likely to throw out flowers and fruit. Those are the ones I really want to focus on and highlight. So what I'll do now is come through, comb through my dragonfruit stems and prune off any that are in the back that are really not getting a ton of sun and are sort of just sucking vegetative growth out of the plant. And then I'll also take out any lateral shoots. So we just got to bust our pruning shears out and get to work. So I've identified this piece of stem tissue here and this stem offshoot right here as pretty good candidates for pruning because both of these are in the back of the plant. You can see the sun is coming in. This is south over here. Over here, they're just starting to come out and I'd rather take these and propagate them and give them to friends or family than I would to allow them to remain. So I'm going to come over here and we're just going to give it a quick chop here. And if we want to propagate these, we would actually want to take this off right here and make a cutting just about right there. And then you would let this section dry. And then from there you could go ahead and pot it up and you'd get a nice cutting. So this amount here is what I ended up taking off the plant, mostly just pruning from the back where it's not going to get a lot of sun. Like I said, over here, not a lot of sun throughout the day. And focusing most of the growth to be falling over the balcony here. And we're going to hope that that spurs the plant to divert a little more energy into producing both vegetation and fruits and flowers on this side of the plant where it's getting more favorable growing conditions. So we finished pruning our dragon fruit in an effort to spur on some new growth and some fruiting and flowering. Now the other thing that can potentially cause a lack of flowering is just not the right growing condition. So if temps drop below about 65 degrees, it's really not going to produce a flower and you'll have to wait until next year to give it another shot. Sometimes you can also in spring not water it as much and that may induce flowering as you move into summer. That's something I've yet to experiment with cause it's fall right now. But we took some cuttings. We have prepared these cuttings. I'll release a future video on the process of getting a cutting off your dragon fruit, preparing it, letting it dry, rooting it, et cetera. So guys it's been five days and I did not expect this at all. I didn't expect that my changes would have such an immediate impact. But we have five buds that have formed on this one particular stem of dragon fruit. So I wanted to show you this because it's going to be a while before these actually turn into dragon fruit themselves. But to get buds after such a short time period both in cultivating the plant from cuttings but also just making those changes you just saw is pretty darn crazy. So here you can see, this is how they show up. There's just these little buds. And then as soon as the dragon fruit actually creates that flower and then pollinates, then you've got 50 days from there until the fruit is fully mature. But take a look. You can see the early development here looking very beautiful. And as we zoom out, that's the only one that has them. But hey, I'll take one over zero, especially in the first year of this plant's growth. So I hope you guys have enjoyed the dragon fruit saga as it unfolds. I highly encourage you to watch part one and part two of this series. But part three is coming to a close. I'm going to keep monitoring this. If you'd like to see more regular updates, you can always follow me on Instagram at Epic Gardening. But there will be a part four as soon as we get the flowers and probably a part five once we pollinate and that fruit starts to set. So stay tuned. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.