Up until about five years ago dragon fruit conjured up images of smoothie bowls embellished with this vibrant red or white-fleshed fruit permeated with thousands of tiny black seeds. A very far-off reality for me for two reasons, I don’t like smoothie bowls and I was very unfamiliar with dragon fruit, unaware of it being indigenous to the Americas and the Caribbean.

Dragon fruit, or pitahaya is a tropical fruit of several different cactus species. Its most alluring quality is the fuchsia pink skin, overlaid with what appears to be green-tipped petals and, of course, the juicy pulp that lays within. It is also edible from skin to pulp.

Recently, my interest piqued when I sampled some dragon fruit and realised that it was in fact locally grown. I met up with the farmer Anderson Bissoon, who farms dragon fruit, on his Tropical Dragon Fruit Farm in south Trinidad.

Bissoon began his dragon fruit project five years ago when looking for exotic fruit to grow on some land he had prepared to farm.

[caption id="attachment_917987" align="alignnone" width="768"] Anderson Bissoon in his garden - Wendy Rahamut[/caption]

Easy to grow and easy to multiply, he now has close to 500 trees all bearing this fruit. Bissoon experiments and cross pollinates the indigenous and imported varieties in order to offer a variety to his customers. He has yellow, white and red.

Dragon fruit is easy to cultivate from cuttings, with the growth cycle from nursery to fruit-bearing mature plant in around nine-12 months. The season for fruit bearing, according to Bissoon, is March to November with about eight cycles within that time frame.

The dragon fruit plant has long cactus stalks which must be pinned onto five-foot concrete stumps, which Bissoon gets fabricated for his plants. At the top, he places a circular frame, where he coaxes the cactus branches through to encourage them to hang down. Constant pruning is necessary to keep the trees manageable.

The first sign of fruit appears as bud on the cactus nodes along the branches. It takes about one to five days from bud to flower and then the magic appears. This hylocereus flower only opens to full bloom at night, from 7 pm-7 am. "The scent from these flowers lingers heavily in the night air,” said Bissoon, “with a sweetness resembling primrose.”

Thirty days after blooming the flower dries, the fruit matures and is ready for harvesting. The mature dragon fruit appears green at first and turns bright magenta two days later.

Bissoon is also experimenting with dehydrating the fruit, which tastes delicious, by the way, and has tried his hand at making anchar from the skin and tea with the dried flower pod.

[caption id="attachment_917986" align="alignnone" width="768"] Wendy Rahamut and Anderson Bissoon on the Dragon Fruit farm on set of Indigenous Bites. -[/caption]

A wonderful initiative in growing and harvesting a once imported fruit bringing us one step closer to sustainability in agriculture.

When you purchase a dragon fruit it is ready to be consumed, no need to wait for th