Video Guides

Hello dragon fruit enthusiasts! This is Jay, with Hybridizing Dragon Fruit, where we teach YOU how to make your very own dragon fruit varieties! Today’s tip of the day is about: Creating with Intent. I would like to share some thoughts and tips that will help GUIDE you, in YOUR journey to create your very own dragon fruit hybrids. There is quite a bit to go over, so let’s begin…

Planning should be the VERY first step when you decide to develop a brand-new hybrid! Simply crossing together two RANDOM dragon fruit cultivars is certainly NOT the best way to go about creating a brand-new hybrid. Because the goal is and should always be to create a hybrid that is SUPERIOR to its parentage.

For instance, let’s say your favorite tasting cultivar produces a very small fruit. You may want to consider crossing it with a variety that produces much larger fruit. With that in mind, your new goal should be: to look for a seedling that has the fruit TASTE of its mother, but has the fruit SIZE of its father.

However, it’s not as straightforward and easy as just growing a single seedling and getting the result you want on the first try. The mother plant, the one that is ACCEPTING pollen, will make up ROUGHLY 60% of the genetic material in your crossing, with the father contributing somewhere around 40% of the genetics. Keep in mind though, this does NOT account for both DOMINANT and RECESSIVE genes, which can throw off that balance QUITE a bit.

For example: Ocamponis genes tend to be very dominant, just like Costaricensis and Guatemalensis genes to name a few. And, while it's true that you normally will get more genes from the mother than the father, if any of these were the father, it would still seem as if it were getting more genetic material due to those dominant genes that tend to express themselves pretty frequently. For instance, even with Ocamponis as the father, the brachs on the fruit of your hybrid will almost always have that Ocamponis look to some degree.

Now, the genes donated from each parent plant will be expressed differently in each and every seedling. So, in order to get the result you are looking for, ideally you want to grow out as MANY seedlings as possible! Allowing each one to grow out until producing a single fruit, which then can be initially evaluated. Now it can take years for the fruit to truly mature, but at this stage, the first will be sufficient  to decide the next course of action. Seedlings that fall outside of our acceptable range can be cut down at this stage, and those that pass, can move on for further evaluation of traits.

And on that note it’s time to discuss traits. Traits… are… EVERYTHING! A SINGLE bad trait can ruin many MONTHS or even… YEARS of progress. Let’s say FOR instance: you have a favorite dragon fruit cultivar that you want to use as your mother plant. You have grown it for some time now, have gotten to know its growth habits, its fruiting cycles, and it’s a dragon you VERY much enjoy.

Now one day, you decide to cross it with another cultivar that has a REALLY incredible looking fruit or flower, whatever the case may be. So, you head to your local nursery, or online retailer, and pick up a cutting and grow it out until the day, it FINALLY flowers. How ABSOLUTELY exciting! You collect your pollen, and  then subsequently cross pollinate your favorite dragon with this new pollen. After a few days that fruit takes, and the excitement builds, as you think about all the INCREDIBLE possibilities…

HOWEVER, in your HASTE to pick out the traits you wanted to ADD to your favorite dragon when making your choice, you were not aware of some of the BAD traits that many cultivars HAVE that few people talk about. ESPECIALLY many of the sellers that distribute them.

So, in this PARTICULAR case, the father plant you chose had a trait that makes the plant less hardy and extremely susceptible to both heat and cold. And while this gene is expressed in the father plant and will display these symptoms, incidentally, the mother plant actually carries this gene as well, only it was recessive so you may not have known about it in the FIRST place unless you understood its parentage.

What ends up happening, is: Since both parents carry this gene, the likelihood of the resulting seedlings actually EXPRESSING this gene would be VERY high. Which would be INCREDIBLY devastating to find out some MONTHS, or even YEARS later after having grown out, or even worse… having distributed it out to other people.

Remember, not only should you be thinking about the wonderful traits you are trying to EXPRESS in your hybrids, but the ones you want to AVOID, as well, because a dragon that not only has nice fruit, but is also RESILIENT, is what we ALL strive for…

If you would like to learn more about creating your own dragonfruit hybrids, please give us a thumbs up, a subscribe, and be sure to join our Facebook group @Facebook/groups/HybridizingDragonFruit.

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