2023: Spring

Intro

Our little garden really only had it’s first planned growing season in the spring of 2023. We started in 2022 just playing around with a few Dragon Fruit, the goal really only being to keep them alive. We brought them inside for the winter, and then wanted to make some real progress in spring of 2023. At the beginning of the growing season, we quickly realized that our Dragon Fruits were going to need some better support. We used some green plastic cages indoors, which worked inside, but they were no where near stable enough to combat wind.

Image showing Dragon Fruits in cloth pots and poor support.

The Trellis Games

At first we thought we might was to buy a few trellises, however you need something pretty big for Dragon Fruits if you are going to place them in a forever home, and we get a fair amount of wind here in Cedar Park. It quickly become apparent that if we were going to do this, we would need to build our own. We came up with the following design.

Image of trellis design.

Once we had a general design and measurements planned out we went to the hardware store. I should note here that the only real reason this was cost effective, was that we had a few tools already at home, and the delusion that we could use them safely. We had a saw, a drill, and a few egg crates we could use as saw horses. So with that, all we really needed was some wood, and nails. The only tricky part here was getting the wood cut small enough to where we could fit it in the car.

Before long we had the various portions cut, put together and placed in the pots. After that, all we had to do was fill the pots with dirt and move the plants over.

Image of Dragon Fruits in trellis

We started off with zip ties to hold the Dragon in place, but quickly ended up using large stables and twine. The zip ties worked well enough, but between the heat from the sun making them hot, and the sharp edges cutting into the plants, we quickly decided that was not a good idea.

Tomatoes

In addition to the Dragon Fruit plants, we also adopted a few tomatoes this year. These poor babies get more of a foot note then they do anything else. They grew in the early spring, but quickly hit one problem after another, if it was not bugs, it was rot, if not rot, the 135 degree weather cooked them.

The poor tomatoes of 2023.