Dragon Fruit Tree

This post should really be called 'Dragon Fruit Plant on a Tree'. Two posts ago I replied to a comment and mentioned our Dragon Fruit plant (Pitaya) and how the only fruit we ever see are small and pathetic, and on the ground, along with ginormous dead flowers. I first tasted the white fleshed variety in China, without it's skin and cut up, so didn't recognise it at the time. Twenty or more years ago I planted a small piece of the Pitaya cactus at the base of a gum tree.

This is the way a fruit bearing DF plant should look, neat, trimmed and well maintained.

This is our DF plant.

Recently I started to tidy up and add to the small garden at the tree's base, but the Rotty quickly trampled it while stalking a possum who pokes it's head out of the DF plant from time to time.

The DF pant has sucked the life out of the tree it lives on, not a skerrick of bark can be seen through the curtain of roots and certainly no sign of greenery elsewhere.

It sways unnervingly towards the house when the wind is blowing and if it ever did come to grief, it would do so on our lounge room roof.

This is our DF plant now!

We've been meaning to do that for years. Of course it will re-sprout and is still too tall to fruit properly, but at least it doesn't have far to fall now.

Good news...the possum was nowhere in site, it must have got fed up with the Rotty and moved house...well that's what I told myself for the next few days until Stray gave the almighty mess a nudge with his backhoe. Not long after I spotted the Rotty having a Mexican stand off with a possum in the yard. It seemed quite OK, just wet with slobber on it's back.

The possum taking refuge in a nearby, spindly tree.

I bags not being on clean up duty, and hey, Stray's got a much bigger shovel than me anyway.

Cheers!