Saturday, September 17, 2011

Holy Guacamole!

I've had flower and vegetable gardens most of my adult life, so I'm not exactly a newbie when it comes to growing things.  But I have never grown an avocado tree.  There is a first time for everything though and thank goodness for the Internet where practically anything you want to research is right there at your fingertips! 

When I was on vacation last week, my friend, Teresa, gave me a tiny avocado seedling.  She said it came from an avocado plucked from a tree on her brother's dairy farm in California.  It was well started in rich potting soil when she gave it to me and seemed to be thriving.  Teresa promised she would come up for a visit one day soon so I'm just hoping I can keep this little seedling happy and thriving at least until she gets up here! 

Yeoldfurt loves guacamole so it would be  nice to be able to grow our own.  But everything I've read so far says that trees started from seed produce rarely fruit.  It seems the best fruit-producing avocado trees are grafted as seedlings.  That's a very tedious process with only about a 50 percent success rate even for professional growers.  So this little seedling, if it matures into a tree, will most likely just have to be appreciated for it's beauty and not so much it's fruit.  If I am successful in growing it though, I might look into buying a grafted seedling so Yeoldfurt could have his home grown avocados. 

Any advice from those of you who have grown avocados from seed would be most welcome!

4 comments:

  1. Interesting! I'm sadly I'm allergic to avocados :(

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  2. That is sad, Manuela ...some things are just best with lots of quacamole! Thanks for the visit though. I enjoy your blog!

    : )

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  3. Sorry, HB, I have no advice for you. They do make a pretty tree, Catman has about 4 or 5 of them that he started from seed, they are various sizes. He was disappointed with the information that I found online about how they produce fruit, but he liked the looks of the trees so he kept the seedlings.

    I keep hoping maybe one of them will be an exception, a miracle or something and produce at least one measly little avocado. :)

    Have a good day!
    Hugs~Fel~

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  4. Well, Fel, to give you hope, what I'VE read online says they DO occasionally produce fruit when grown from seed ...but it's rare, they don't produce in abundance and supposedly the quality is not as good as the fruit from a grafted tree.

    But I will be hoping right along with you and if we get ONE FRUIT and it's edible, I say we have beaten the odds and should do a Happy Dance!

    : )

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