The Tropical Fruit Forum

If you have access to the fruit, you can always grow your own from seed. When you eat your next fruit, save a bunch of the seeds, clean them off, scatter a bunch in a pot, using well draining soil, then cover lightly.  Water and wait.  If its fresh seed, it should have a high germination rate.  After a bit, pick the largest 3-4, pot them up, and then wait (a couple of years - the only downside.)  I've done it on a lark, using seed from an uninspiring white flesh DF.  I've pretty much neglected the two survivors, they are in small pots on the side of the house.  One's about 4' high.  If I was serious about fruit from them I'd put them on my trellis and take care of them.  But its an option.

Indeed I'm def considering it. I'm up to page 45 in this thread but I'm still a little confused about a few things regarding pollinating so I'm kind of worried that if I grow something where I'm not explicitly told how to go about pollinating I might have a hard time troubleshooting as it were while I'm still new. But I guess if I can get a bunch of flowers at once I can just try a different thing on each flower, see what happens and go from there. Especially considering if I do it from seed by the time it's ready I may have already had a few years with other DF plants and be in a better place to figure it out...

Ok, first off, your best bet is to start back a few pages and read up on past discussion. a lot of questions about pollinization, crossbreeding and such can be found there. Second, do NOT grow dragon fruit thinking your main crop is going to be the yellow fruit. The Megalanthus, the yellow that's actually good, is a giant pain in the rear to grow and to get to produce, and even harder to wait for, as it has a ripening time up to 3 TIMES that of common dragon fruit. What you should strive for is to produce a collection of fruit, and if you want to include the yellow into that, that's fine. Try and pick yourself up a good red/magenta variety, like American Beauty, or others, for fruit production, one of the sweeter white ones for presentation, and as I recommend to everyone, try and get at least one S-8 "sugar dragon" for both flavor and pollen production. You can add yellows, or anything else you fancy, to this list. Yellow Megalanthus is not what I would call a 'beginners' variety. I grew it for a while and Ive removed it from my collection. I have limited space and it wasn't worth the resources required to maintain it.
Other than that, welcome to the community. I'm sure we can help you get into the groove of things here.

Thank you so much for your advice it's so very appreciated. I'm so in love with the yellow that I feel, at least now, that I don't want to let anything hold me back so I'm def going to take your advice and not rely on one yellow and one red to get consistent results and try to set myself up with four plants if I can make it work, or else I'll start with some other varieties and introduce the yellow when the time is right, that's def thoughtful advice. I'll try to keep an eye out for the sugar dragon variety but in Ohio I'm pretty much limited to what I can get shipped to me from online companies... That said long term I'm thinking I may take a road trip southwest looking for a farm where I can get more varieties. Just something on the back of my mind... Anyway thank you so much for taking the time

Hello, super new and super dumb here but if I could bother anybody to answer a few very basic questions about growing dragon fruit I would be so very grateful.. I really want to start growing Dragon Fruit (happy to keep it indoors when necessary due to my zone) but particularly a yellow. I found a place that has a yellow variety cutting in stock and in their description they say it is best to grow with 2-3 other varieties for cross pollination. I've looked up how to do the pollinating myself but, probably because this is such a stupid question, I haven't actually heard somebody directly state if a yellow dragon fruit can cross pollinate with a red variety for instance. My impression is you can but if you grow another fruit from the seeds produced it'll be a new variety and that's one reason (in addition to ease/speed) people use cuttings, to maintain favorable variety. I just don't want to buy the only yellow cutting I can find available online at the moment and pair it with something I'm too ignorant to realize isn't compatible. Also how would I cross pollinate with more than one variety if I were to buckle down and dedicate enough house space to three plants..? Do I just gather pollen from all three and swap or is it just best to shuffle it up after a harvest or two so it's not always the same thing..? Another thing that seems important, is there any way to influence two or more plants to flower at the same time? Do they have the internal clock or do I just hope for the best? I know the flowers don't last long and I've heard you can freeze the pollen for up to 30 days if you really need to but even then at the very least I can't pollinate the first flower I see. Not a big deal I'm just wondering if there's something I'm missing. Or can I buy a red variety that is self pollinating but also use that to pollinate a yellow variety that isn't..?
I would love to ask ten more questions and really go into this as prepared as possible but I'm also happy to fail until I get it right and really I just want to understand the cross pollination thing so I'll stop there. Thanks so much to anybody who let me take their time and good day to all