Not like pineapples (I have those too, but have to keep them, and the dragon fruit, in the greenhouse or the sunroom in winter. The vanilla orchid never leaves the greenhouse or sunroom). Because even if our summers are beastly hot, we can and do get snow, sleet and hail in winter. Pineapple will grow on a sunny porch for most of the year, just needs cover for the bitter part of winter - it's a bromeliad. What I really need is one of those Victorian-era pineapple houses, with the manure pits, like at Heligan.
Dragon fruit (Hylocereus species, mine is probably H. undatus or a hybrid thereof) are a twining/climbing cactus, with long angular stems that can grow a couple of metres tall before drooping over at the top. Only the drooping stems flower and bear fruit. The flowers are gorgeous, rather like those of their distant (or not so distant, depending which botanist you argue with) relative, Selenicereus or Queen of the Night cactus, and are followed by large edible fruit with those scale-like persistent sepal thingies, hence 'dragon fruit'. Mine is the kind with pink skin and white flesh studded with tiny black crunchy seeds. I had the sort with dark red flesh, which has a stronger, sweeter taste, but my plant died in a cold winter.
Wouldn't mind if we were subtropical, but we have hot dry summers with bushfires, and freezing winters. I need a greenhouse to grow some things, a shadehouse for others, until storms tear them apart and I have to bring plants into the house. I live at the Adelaide Hills end of South Australia's Barossa Valley, and our always extreme climate seems to be becoming more so. At the moment (early spring) our most prominent crop is weeds!
