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I am the only person growing dragon fruit in the high desert 🏜️ 760 sandbernandino oak hills to be precise we have long cold winters and we blistering summers all 4 seasons I’ve had mine dor 3 years now this is my 3rd season and I’m really hoping for some fruit

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Audio is terrible, so I typed a transcript. The speaker passed away in 2015, and this deserves preservation. Our next speaker has been a rare fruit grower in the valley for many years... (door slam) Member of the Arizona chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers, he spent the last fifty years experimenting with dragon fruit and other rare fruits, and with the help of the late Paul Thompson, he has become an expert on growing dragon fruit in the valley. (Dr Alois Falkenstein) Good morning, everyone. We’ll start out with a nice picture. That’s a dragon fruit. It’s about two pounds, it was taken at Paul Thompson's house. He and I enjoyed that dragon fruit. (Lots of noise, doors slamming, incoherent) …went 15 feet up a citrus tree, had fruit on the top. Like Christmas decorations. (changes slides) There are different ways of growing the fruit. I find that different species require different densities of shade cloth. (incoherent) if you use no shade cloth, they will die in the summer heat, no doubt about it. I (incoherent) sixty percent shade cloth (incoherent) it looks like candle wax dripping. This past February, temperatures dropped to twenty-two degrees. It was the coldest temperatures recorded in my backyard, and (incoherent.) Flowering comes in waves. The Spring flowering is very…(incoherent.) May and June. The onset of the monsoon is July. A nice rain, the temperature drops, and the whole yard lights up with flower buds. Monsoon leaves in early September…(incoherent.) I’ll discuss irrigation now. My basic irrigation plan is flood irrigation. I open up a valve in my backyard, and it floods my yard to about a depth of eight inches. Two times a month in the summer, and once a month in the winter. If the plants are bearing fruit, I give them extra water, watering them weekly until a few days prior to picking the fruit. The fruit seems to taste better if you don’t water them immediately prior to harvesting. For fertilizer, I use Ammonium Sulfate. This seems to work well. It’s inexpensive as far as fertilizers go, and it’s also useful for my citrus and lawn. Most people say you don’t need other fertilizers than Ammonium Sulfate. There are a lot of minerals in the soil naturally, nitrogen. Several growers told me that high phosphate fertilizers will increase blossom formation, and I’m trying this also. (incoherent) It does help if you have some high phosphate fertilizer. I’ll discuss vines and trellis systems now. This is what Paul Thompson used, it is poles with three wires on either side ran between them. You can also grow on a pole. In Southeast Asia, they put a pole in the ground, put a wagon wheel on the top… you can also grow it on the side of a tree. This (slide) is a Medjool date palm. For good flower and fruit production, you need to prune the vines. When I was visiting with Paul, there was a commercial Israeli grower, and he said, “The more you prune them, the more fruit you get.” I personally prune in January and February just because it’s convenient, I can’t say it’s the best time, it is just when I happen to do it. I find that flowers form on horizontal and drooping branches, I’ve never seen one on a climbing branch. The major labor is in pollination of the flowers. Most (of my) varieties are not self-fertile, and therefore, hand pollination is required to insure a good fruit set. For commercial growers, the biggest expense aside from (incoherent) is to pay their hand pollinators. The flowers open at sunset and close a few hours after sunrise, so pollination is done at night or early morning. I just wear a headlamp. The first thing you do is gather the pollen. I go out in the evening and collect pollen into a plastic container that is labeled with the variety. For best pollen set, I cross-pollinate with a different species of the same genus. If you use a different genus, it sometimes doesn’t work. I store the pollen in the refrigerator, and it remains viable for about eight days. I tried freezing it once, but it didn’t work for me. Bats and moths are the usual natural pollinators. I have three or four self-fertile varieties, and their stamen is short, the same height as the anthers. Fruit becomes ripe about forty to forty-five days after pollination. I find that when the fruit attains its full color, it is basically ripe. It might get a little riper, but waiting longer does no good, it is about as good as it's going to get when it has full color. You can keep hylocereus fruit for about one week at room temperature, or about two weeks between fifty and fifty-eight degrees. Many refrigerators are colder and cause damage. Some Stenocereus megalanthus can be stored down to forty-two degrees. When the fruit is stored, it loses water, acidity and sugar. The acidity drops faster than the sugar. Ten days of storage loses three percent of the water content. Five percent loss looks visibly damaged. Acidity in the fruit affects the taste. Sweetness (incoherent) doesn’t provide taste, but gives it balance. The pH of the hylocereus fruit is about 4.5-5.5 depending on the acidity. (incoherent) for comparison, the acidity of a nice cherry is about 0.7 percent (percent isn’t a pH unit, so something is missing here.) The best test of fruit taste is: If you like it, you like it. There are some objective ways to test the taste, and I’ll discuss that. Sugars are glucose, fructose and sucrose. Percentages matter, because fructose tastes twice as sweet as glucose, with sucrose falling in the middle. If I have a nice variety, I’ll check the brix percentage of sweetness with this. It is called a refractometer. You put a little bit of juice in it, and a higher sugar content leads to an increase in the refractive index. By passing light through a sample of undissolved solids and measuring the refraction, which is the amount that the light bends, the sugar content can be measured. They did some interesting work at UC Davis in California. They took the brix readings from a bunch of red and white fleshed varieties, and graphed a diagram, where they could tell that a brix of 12 is 40mg of sugar per gram of fruit weight. It goes up about 25mg of fruit weight per every 2 brix. (incoherent) This is only true of dragon fruit. If you take a grape, the brix screening will be a different amount of sugar, and grapes will have their own scale. Red pigment… (incoherent) powerful antioxidant, related to the pigment in beets. Mother nature recycles (incoherent) I can discuss the varieties that I am growing in Arizona. 9-S (Dark Star) a hybrid by Paul Thomson (incoherent) several self-fertile varieties of hylocereus undatus. I also grow Selenicereus megalanthus, which is also a self-fertile variety, and to me, it is one of sweetest, best-tasting varieties. It has yellow skin, white flesh, and has larger seeds than the other varieties that I grow. The fruit takes about six months to ripen, as opposed to about 40-45 days for my hylocereus varieties. The fruit is smaller than those other varieties and has spines that need to be rubbed off. (incoherent) spoke with Paul Thompson (incoherent) Soil they like a sandy, loamy soil. I grafted it to 9-S and it took off for me, and I didn’t have to dig a big hole. (incoherent) months, kilograms. Pests: birds are the major problem. They peck holes, then the ants go in and finish the job. Blue tiles? Held on by clothespins seem to discourage them. Tried Styrofoam cups, brown bags, blue tiles… This is the fun part (slide of three fruit on plate.) (Uses Latin names, points to various fruit in slides.) Audience member mentions 9-S also being called Dark Star. Dr Falkenstein responds that the only hybrid that Paul named was delight, and other people have various names for lots of varieties. When I had full production, I had about 60-70 plants. (slide of a box full of fruit.) I eat them, my grandchildren eat them, and we love them. I met a woman from Thailand that suggested selling them in a farmer’s market, so I brought them to her, and she sold out quickly- the demand exceeds the supply. I’d like to say a few words about propagation. If you wish to have a plant that is identical to the parent, take cuttings. The best place to cut is the joint. If you cut in the middle of the stem, often times, they will rot, because it is just so wet there. I’ll let it cure for a few days, then place them in a pot. Best results are taken from a plant that is actively growing. (incoherent) It can take from several weeks to several months for roots to form. (incoherent.) When I want to produce hybrids, I take pollen from one variety and pollinate a flower of another. I plant the seeds from the resulting fruit. The seed germinates best in warm soil. If the soil is cold, I’ll use a heating pad. If you want your seeds cleaned, find an area with ants and leave a bowl of fruit. Come back a day later and there are seeds there. In three to five years, your plant will produce fruit. Hopefully, the fruit will have the characteristics that you are looking for. Another way to do this is grafting. If you have a variety that just doesn’t like the soil, grafting is not that difficult. I’ll close by saying that growing in a low elevation like in Arizona presents its challenges, but with perseverance and some luck, (incoherent.) Q&A. Grafting question How many plants do you have now? Last year (2010) I had about 75. Now I have 7 or 8 full-size. The (2011) freeze killed all but one last year, that wasn’t touched. Peruvian Apple Cactus question Darkest variety question Rotting plants question

can you type the names of the drought tolerant fruits you explain. the audio is so bad..

I am sure this was a great educational talk. I hope you do it again with better audio and captions.

White Sapote is one of my favorite fruits. Something has happened to this tree that never happened before. Can anyone tell me why this may have happened? kzbin.info/www/bejne/m2e8lZSGr7mtfcU

Nice

Great presentation, Tom. Thanks. What's typically used for rooting stock? What do you recommend? I can pick up 'Vernon' here in Phoenix and maybe do a multigraft. Another local nursery has 'Redlands' and 'Younghans' which I didn't see mentioned in your talk.

I want to be this person when I grow up

How would you open the Pachycereus marginatus fruit without getting injured? Do you need a brush to remove the needles? Could you elaborate a bit more on the taste. I haven’t found much information on this plant anywhere. Any more information is appreciated

Very informative, thorough, organized, and highly interesting video. Hopefully the coconut tasting Schuester variety and cold hardy. C. Pringlei tree will become more available soon. Ive seen many rare cold hardy tropical trees available on platogram but not those two; not anywhere.

thanks for the info.

I miss you dad 8*(

Great tips Joe. I share this with so many fruit enthusiasts. Sushi and fruit are similar - let the flesh touch your tongue for as long as socially acceptable.

This video rocked my world the first time I saw it. Joe is a gem. I always look for that beautiful spot to taste, now.

Thank you. Question: Do you have to wait until the cutting you want to graft is in blossom or can you make that cutting any time of the year?

Hi, I live in San Jose. Where do I buy these fruit trees? Thanks

lol not even orgasm gives you this type of feeling i bet

What lmao, 100 different apple trees on one?? Amazing!