User talk:Projection70

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[edit] Welcome

Hello, Projection70, and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the Wikipedia Boot Camp, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type {{helpme}} on your user page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

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[edit] Dragonfruit

The bonsai picture was taken a few weeks ago. The bottom plant was bought in a nursey around August. The top left plant was planted at about the same time. Since that was my first time to plant the pitaya seeds, the top left plant turned out to be a little unruly. The top right plant was purchased about two weeks before I took the picture. If you look carefully, you might see one or two pitaya seed shells on the top right plant! Some of my friends almost thought I was raising catepillars when they saw the tiny branches.

I beleive it is possible to grow a pitaya bonsai indoors in Long Island. What you need is plenty of light (a dedicated lamp should suffice). During the winter when your radiator or heating system is on resulting in low indoor humidity, you might want to water the plants every other day. Otherwise, water the plants once every three to four days. As long as you don't let your room to be at freezing temperatures, the pitaya should do fine.

My impression is that the size of plants is partially restrained by the size of their pot, so I suspect that my pitaya bonsai will remain a bonsai. As for the small leaves, they should eventually disappear, although you probably have noticed from the picture that they have not for the past seven to eight months.

Here's my personal experience with the regular size dragonfruit plant. If you cut off a branch of a large pitaya plant, plant it in a large pot, place the pot in a region with moderate sunlight, and use plenty of organic fertilizer such as chicken poo, in two years the plant would have covered the entire wall/barrier of an apartment porch. Also in two years the pitaya will probably bear fruit. The pitaya is a very organic plant in the sense that no pesticides are needed and environemental friendly fertilizer can be used.

I would think that California would be an okay environment to grow pitaya. I'm just extremeley surprised that this fruit hasn't become popular in the United States whereas in Asia, it's a massive hit. Many Asians actually believe that this native Latin American fruit originated from Vietnam. The first time I saw this fruit was when the trade embargo between Taiwan and Vietnam was lifted.

In the United States, I saw the fruit once at Berkeley Bowl (a large produce store) in Berkeley, CA. One can order them from www.melissas.com , but they charge three pieces for a highway robbery price of US$48.00, shipping not included. In Taiwan, the standard price is US$1 for one white fleshed fruit and about US$6 for an extermely high quality (gift-like) fruit. Maybe I'll copy my comments here to the pitaya discussion page so that we can start a large discussion there about this fruit. Take care. Allentchang 13:05, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Hi, weird congestion problems also prevented me from watching the video for some time. I finally saw the video last Saturday. Interesting names he chose for his new varities of pitaya. I wish that the video had a larger default volume as I had to set all my volume setting to maximum to fully hear what he was saying. And then sometimes there were video contrast problems. Nevertheless, my mom happened to see the video too and really enjoyed it. Allentchang 23:29, 16 April 2006 (UTC)