On August 23, you can join John Schoustra in a tasting of six varieties that are in season at Apricot Lane Farms in Moorpark, Ventura County: Pinkerton, Hass, Nabal, Reed, Lamb, and Gelado.
Schoustra is the orchard manager at Apricot Lane.
In addition, he cultivates another 30 acres in Somis, where he farms avocados in unorthodox yet highly effective ways. (I’ve visited his trees a number of times and seen the evidence.) He uses zero pesticides or fertilizers. He plants trees on berms of soil and then covers the berms and alleys with tons of wood-chip mulch. Read much more about John Schoustra’s methods in this interview I did with him last year.
John will lead the tasting and discuss avocado growing (so bring questions). You will also take one avocado of each variety home. What an opportunity!
See here for details about “Avocado Immersion: Talk, Tasting, and Q&A with John Schoustra”.
Hi Greg,
We met at the rare fruit meetings on grafting. I had lots of avo pruning questions. I have pruned our reed back per your suggestions. That tree has been dropping avocados every day. I’m trying to determine the cause. I contacted the board and each has given a few ideas. Marcia gave me your website. More than 300 have dropped. There are many many more on the tree but if they don’t stop dropping, there will be none left. Any ideas about why this is happening and how to get it to stop?
Thanks for any tips
Hi Mariko,
Are these avocados that are dropping part of the new crop (that started growing this past spring)? If that’s the case, and you still have many more on the tree, then it might be a good thing that the tree is shedding so much because Reeds get very big (as you know) and they set too much fruit in some years. They need to shed some in order to be able to handle the remaining crop. Many people, myself included, have broken branches on Reed trees because the tree itself didn’t drop enough young avocados and the grower didn’t remove even more.
I hope you still have a good crop remaining on the tree. The only factors that you can really control regarding fruit drop on avocados are proper watering and maintaining soil fertility, and providing for cross pollination appears to help a bit too.
Check out this post for details: https://gregalder.com/yardposts/avocado-fruit-drop-why-when-how-many/
Hi Greg, I just purchased a 15 gal (about 8 feet tall) Hass from a local nursery and it has 7 avocados on it!! The avocados are small- about 2.5” wide and 4” tall. At first, I assumed they are still growing but after reading your various articles, I learned that the latest Hass should be harvested is in October. Seeing we are now in September should I harvest these little guys? I also learned the small size of these fruits could be from the tree being stressed? But the tree looks very healthy with large deep green leaves and new growth on various tips. Or do young potted Hass trees just produce smaller fruit. Does the fruit size grow bigger once the tree grows bigger? Thanks so much for your expertise!