Building our Dragonfruit Trellises
Starting Our Dragonfruit Garden
Over the last few years, we’ve collected quite a few dragonfruit plants. Unfortunately, they spent all that time neglected, lying on the ground in our smaller shade tunnel. As it turns out, they didn’t seem to mind! The plants thrived so well in there that they turned into a tangled mess, making it almost impossible to walk through the space.
Untangling them was a job in itself, as they’d grown into a self-made web. After carefully pulling them out and separating them, I had to prune them back into manageable plants. While this meant losing a lot of growth on the rooted plants, the silver lining was ending up with over 100 cuttings! Not wanting them to go to waste, I potted them up in bundles of three or more per pot, each supported by a bamboo stake. This was back in the cool of winter, and now, six months later, nearly every single cutting has rooted and started to grow!
Once the cuttings were potted, it was time to tackle a long-awaited project: building trellises for our rooted dragonfruit plants.
Building the Trellises
Thankfully, we had plenty of old timber lying around. Some weathered jarrah posts were perfect for the main supports, along with treated pine lengths originally intended for the house but repurposed. I cut the jarrah posts in half to a height of 1.4m and crafted the trellis tops from pine, cutting each piece into 45cm lengths and assembling them with wood glue and screws.
To stabilize the trellises (dragonfruit can get heavy as they grow), I added “feet” using jarrah offcuts. The jarrah was so old that I had to do a lot of pre-drilling before attaching the top and feet. Once assembled, I gave each trellis two coats of exterior paint for protection against the elements.
Planting the Dragonfruit Garden
I decided to start with six trellises and set them up at the bottom of our veggie garden. Each large pot was placed on a concrete paver, spaced roughly 1.8m apart in a grid. The pots were filled with layers of sandy gravel, garden soil, and mulch. Before planting, I wrapped and stapled a strip of shade cloth around the center post of each trellis to help the plants grip as they grew.
Finally, I planted four dragonfruit per pot (one on each side of the post) and gently secured them to the trellises with garden ties.
Six Months Later
Fast forward to January, and the garden is thriving! The dragonfruit have been loving the summer heat, growing quickly and starting to branch out over the tops of the trellises. I’ve been nipping off unwanted buds to encourage upward growth, and it’s paying off.
Recently, I added two more trellises to plant some red dragonfruit from the now-rooted cuttings. While we haven’t seen flowers or fruit yet, I feel like we’re getting close! With red, white, yellow, and mystery varieties (the labels are long gone), it’s exciting to imagine the colorful harvests we’ll hopefully enjoy in the future.
For now, we’ll keep watering, waiting, and cheering on our dragonfruit as they continue to grow!
