How to Build a Dragon Fruit Trellis and Plant Your First Dragon Fruit Cutting

It's no secret that I love dragon fruit. Yeah, this is nice. Nice. Sweet. Yeah. In fact, I just picked up six new rare varieties, which is why in this video I'm going to take these massive pots that I got and show you how to build a very simple dragon fruit trellis. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening, where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb. And when it comes to the world of dragon fruit, setting them up for success at the start of their life is crucial because these are going to live for five up to 10 years. So put them in the right home and let them blossom. I've got all the materials here. They're not that expensive. I'll give you options on how to make it cheaper and ways to do it a little bit more effectively. But without further ado, cultivate that Like button. And I will personally come to your home and bless you with 20 years of Epic Dragon Fruit success. And let's get into the video. The first and most important ingredient is going to be your pot. I recommend going no lower than 20 gallons. Now these are slightly larger. The ones I typically would recommend are black plastic nursery pots, 20 gallons and they're a little bit more of the stout. Sometimes they're sold as a squat pot. It's just because you want a wider base because we're going to be designing some pretty tall trellises. You don't want the wind knocking them over. I couldn't find those in the entire city. So I guess there's a shortage right now. I went with a little bit more of a bougie fancy terracotta. These were about 40 bucks each. They weren't cheap, but I wanted to splurge because I'm putting some pretty rare dragon fruit in them that are going to live for years and years. So I figured why not make it look nice. For your lumber, you have a couple of different options, but basically you need four by fours and two by fours. I went with five foot tall. I actually bought 10 foot and had them cut it in half at the big box store. This is a redwood fence post. So it's four by four and it's quite, quite dense, a little bit more on the pricey side, but you're going to be burying quite a bit of this in the soil. So I didn't want it to rot, especially cause it's going to be there for five, maybe even 10 years. So again, you could go with Douglas fir, something a little cheaper, just all depends on your budget there. As far as the two by fours, these are going to be what is used to frame both the bottom and the top of the trellis. And so you don't really need it to be too fancy. Although I did go with cedar, especially because those bottom legs are what gives the trellis stability. Didn't want those to rot out. And I might as well just stick with cedar on top if I'm going to use it on bottom. That's all you need. As far as pot and lumber, you obviously need some tools to get things together. I chose some two and a half inch exterior deck screws. I've got some drills, one for the screws, one for the pilot holes. Obviously you could just use one drill if you want and a circular saw. You know, a lot of the times when you do these builds, a lot of people say, Oh, the tools don't make it a cheap project. That's true. These are an investment, but you can also just go to the big box store and they will cut it for you. So if you have your cut list, which I put down in the description, you can get this done for free or a very minimal price. Before we begin with the actual cuts, let's explain why you build a trellis this way. So let's imagine we've potted our dragon fruit up and it's growing just like this. Well, it wants to grow vertically upwards, but it also throws out all these little side shoots. Now this one hasn't yet because it's a small one. But as this grows up, what it's going to want to do is come and fall back down. That gives the entire area a lot of sun access. And that's what it needs to put out those fruits and those flowers. Because it takes quite a bit of energy out of the dragon fruit to put these massive flowers and massive fruits out. So what we'll do is we're going to take our fence posts and we're going to sink them to here. But if we just did that, the soil is not really going to hold it in place. So we're going to build a little pinwheel down at the bottom to give it some stability. And then up top, we're building a square frame that the dragon fruit cutting can come up, out and fall back down, almost like Cousin It. Eventually when it really starts to branch out, you almost won't even see this part anymore. And it will be a complete 360 degrees of dragon fruit just spilling over the top of the trellis. So with that said, let's cut our bottom piece to create the bottom of the trellis. To figure out how long the two by fours need to be that are attached to the bottom here, I'm going to place it roughly in the center and then grab my tape measure. And I'm going to measure from one side all the way out to roughly the edge. And so we've got seven inches, eight inches. And then if I extend the tape measure out, we're looking at about a 10 inch piece that I need to cut four times. The way this is going to work is we're just going to put one here. And once that one's out, we'll put one here, here and here. So what I like to do is just throw some pilot holes in and then we'll throw in our screws. Really a pretty simple process, about two screws per side. The pinwheel base is complete. Let's just see how sturdy it is in here now. Perfect fit. It wobbles just a little bit, but that's fine. Because once the soil's in there, it'll be nice and stable. And also this isn't even a level surface, but we're looking good in here. Now we've got to build the top. Our top is again, constructed with two by four. We need 18 inch long sides that'll be sitting like this, going around, forming a square around the top. And then we just need one connecting piece to put that all together and firm it up. The first thing I'm going to do is put together the outside frame before I put together the interior attachment. Then we can cut a custom piece for that and it snugs up really nicely. Now I just need to measure these inside edges here. It looks like it's about 14 and a half inches or so. So I'm going to cut a piece to bisect these so we can attach it to our big pole. Now that the frame's complete, I need one piece that just bisects these long sides and sits flat down here on the bottom, which I've already cut. It's 14 and a half inches, which is just slightly shy, which kind of snugs this in a little bit. So we just need to throw some pilot holes in and put this in. The final piece of construction we need to do is actually the easiest. Just put it on, center it, and we will screw this in with a couple more of these screws here. We should be good to go. All right, we have our pot. We have our dragon fruit. This is the red Jaina. Really interesting variety. We have our potting soil and we have our trellis. So we just have to put it all together and actually get this thing assembled. So the first thing that goes in, of course, is our newly built trellis. So in that goes, I've already leveled the pot. The bottom on this pot is a little more raised than I would like it to be. So I'm going to have to kind of plumb this while I fill the soil in. So I'm going to grab this one here. It's okay to let this wobble a little bit. Indoor or outdoor potting mix is what you want to use when you're potting a dragon fruit up. Don't make a mistake of going heavy on the cactus mix. It is a cactus, but it's a tropical cactus. So it really does prefer rich organic matter. Standard potting mix, the highest quality stuff you can find at your local nursery is your best bet. So don't skimp because remember they're going to be in here for years and years and years to come. So give them the best that you can right away. So I want to backfill around my trellis. There we go. Let's just check it. I get pretty obsessive about this. So I want it to be as perfectly straight as I can, which is right about there. So as I fill the rest of this, I'm just going to keep my level on it. Right about there. I think we're good. Alrighty. So we just have to fill around the rest. Now if you're potting up a rooted cutting, then you would gently take this out, flip it upside down and actually make sure that the roots sit flush. But this is actually a cutting that has yet to root. I didn't know when I would get these pots. And so I potted this up just so it could start that process. So this shouldn't have rooted yet. So I'll show you exactly how to pot an unrooted cutting into your trellis and secure it to the system. So number one is get some gloves on. Every variety of dragonfruit for the most part is very spiky. This red janna variety is exceptionally spiky. And so I highly recommend some gloves here. First of all, again, this is a potted up cutting that's not rooted. So I can do it this way. I can just remove my bamboo trellis and take it out because there aren't roots yet. And that actually gives me a good opportunity once I remove this nursery tape here to put it exactly where I want it in the new system. I'll just cut that off later. So what we want to do, you don't need to go too far down. You want to go about two to four inches or so. We'll go in just like this. One of these pots will support four cuttings. So this is just one. I'll be putting in more later. All the same variety of course. So we're going to come in to press it down just about that much. There we go. Now I don't want this falling over. So I'll do a little makeshift support while I take my gloves off. There we go. Now you need nursery tape. So this stuff here, it's really cheap on Amazon. You can buy it and it just wraps around. And as the name implies, it will tape something to something else. What's nice is these dragonfruit have these spikes, which makes it easy to spike the nursery tape to adhere it. And then you can just wrap around like this and you're perfect. I mean, that's really all you need to do here to get this one started. What I like to do then is I come around and nursery tape's inherently slightly tacky. We can remove this now. We don't need this. So we've already stuck this to the pole. I'll remove that one later. I'll show you it one more time up here. Notice how I put it on the side. The side facing the wall is the side where the aerial roots are coming out. Natural climber, as it does in nature, you can be somewhat forceful. They can take a little bit of deformation to get it right up against. Cause really the sooner it gets up top to that trellis top that we created, the better. And so I really want to adhere it and take as much vertical height as I can get. So there goes our next one. Just gently around. There we go. It really is that easy to make a dragonfruit trellis. Here's an example of one. It's a little bit shorter, but this is an example of what it will end up wanting to do. So what you want to do first of all is take your cutting, make sure your cutting is rooted. You want to have a rooted cutting before you put it in here because you want that rooting to take place in the shade and it really doesn't need to be blasted by the sun. It's just going to kind of desiccate the tissue. You don't want that. So again, plant it in here. You want to get it up to here before you really start to let it branch out. So a lot of these little pieces right here, these stems, I ended up cutting off because I don't want to train all of them up to this canopy here where they can hang over. If you like this video on growing dragonfruit, I have an entire playlist that will teach you exactly how to grow it right here. And you can also subscribe to the channel for more epic gardening videos right here. But until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.