Most dragon fruit requires hand pollination. Betsy Brixey, left, dabs pollen into an open flower using a small brush. She wears a headlamp for this process, which occurs only at night. Harvest is also done by hand, as Kevin Brixey, above, demonstrates.
One of Bartelle’s favorite varieties is the Pride of Fallbrook, which he calls “the steak of dragon fruit.” It has a hearty, meaty texture that tastes like sweet cherries. With seemingly endless varieties of dragon fruit, farmers can grapple with deciding what to grow. At Dragon Delights, the Brixeys have settled on varieties ranging from Physical Graffiti (sweet with light purple flesh) to Sugar Dragon (very sweet with reddish-purple flesh). They are experimenting with others. First love, then dragon fruit The Brixeys ventured into the business after relocating from Australia to the San Diego area in 2000. The couple originally met and fell in love while Kevin was traveling in the United States; Betsy grew up in Southern California. The couple had three children and lived for about 10 years in Australia, where Kevin’s farming roots included working with sheep and cattle. They returned to Southern California for a visit and were persuaded to stay by her father, who operated a property management business until he retired and sold it in 2015. The couple bought an abandoned avocado grove in 2000 and began bringing back some trees, cultivating Australian plants and clearing land. When fire swept through the area in 2007, they began looking for a new crop.
‘Cactus with dreadlocks’ Dragon fruit is grown on a trellis system, with many farmers devising their own unique structure. Generally, the plant is trained and pruned to climb along and hang from a trellis—Kevin tells people it “looks like a cactus with dreadlocks.” It can take a few years before a cutting grows to yield a good size and number of fruit. A mature plant can produce fruit in around 40 days after pollination and offer multiple flushes in a growing season that can stretch from early summer to late fall. While some varieties of dragon fruit are self- pollinating, most colorful varieties require hand pollination for good fruit set, Lobo says. “Those are the things that make specialty crop farming a bit of a challenge and unique,” he says. Marlon Bartelle grows dragon fruit with his brother, Mateo, at Sun Dragon Farms in east San Diego County. He says they’ve been successful with self-pollinating varieties of dragon fruit helped along by the hard work of bees. In 2022, he says, the farm enjoyed an extended growing season—even pushing into the first few months of this year—and produced close to 2,000 pounds of fruit. That bounty was sold mainly through contacts, online and at a nearby roadside stand.
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