I have cuttings of Purple Haze if you are still looking. Would love a cutting of your dwarf dragon fruit. Is this the orange variety?

Hi, Jon. The age of the plant makes no difference. We tend to think of the age of plants in the same manner we think of age in humans or animals - chronologically. We, like plants, go through several life stages - embryonic, juvenile, adolescent (intermediate in plants), and mature are stages roughly mirrored in plants. Where we vary greatly is in the way our cells age. In animals, body cells all mature at approximately the same speed. Plants grow by consecutive divisions of cells at the growing points (meristems), so their various parts are different ages (the top of the plant is younger than the basal portion, chronologically). So, if the plant has reached a sufficient age to have mature tissues, vegetative cloning can occur from 3 of the 4 phases I listed above (embryonic excluded for the purpose of what I'm talking about). So, the age of cloned plants is not the chronological age of the parent plant, but the age (or phase if you will) of the portion of the plant from which the cutting was taken. To further confuse you, dormant buds retain the ontogenetic age of their origin. In plants, the more times a cell has to divide to make the tissue, the older it is. This is termed the ontogenetic age and the most recently formed tissue is the oldest, ontogenetically. With this in mind, imagine this: Take a cutting from the basal part of a plant (remember, this formed first & dormant buds retain the age of the tissue at the time they were formed, so the cutting will be immature, but vigorous) and a cutting from the upper portion (this is the older tissue). Let's imagine the cuttings strike (make roots) and begin growing at the same time. The basal cutting will take much longer to flower and fruit because it is taken from a portion of the plant that remains in juvenile phase, while the other cutting will be quick to flower/fruit, because it was taken from mature tissue.. Since juvenile cuttings are more vigorous, it's best to take cuttings from the lowest parts of the plant to help insure a high % of strikes, but fastest flower/fruit can be had by taking branch end-cuttings from upper parts of the plant, at the expense of a lower strike rate. The reason basal suckers root so readily is that they arise from dormant tissues that retain a young ontogenetic age, making them juvenile and vigorous. Al

Oh yeah, I forgot to say... Many types of fruit trees are almost always propagated vegetatively (cuttings, grafted trees, etc). Most apples for instance are unlikely to produce good fruit when grown from seed. Are you only interested in seed grown trees or are you just trying to find out how long it will take for you to grow your own fruit?

I rooted some when I was 8; took 35 years for them to fruit. But! Being an 8 yr old, I didn't know anything about the effects of juglone from the roots of the black walnut tree growing about 20 ft away. Once the BW was removed(many years later), they came on like gangbusters. They have 'perfect' flowers - with both male and female parts in the same blossom, not 'male' and 'female' flowers. The fact that they bloomed last year is encouraging, but sometimes, some of these fruiting plants will bloom, set fruit, and abort it for a year (or a few) before they 'get down to business'.