How far apart to plant avocado trees
Whether you’re planting a single avocado tree or an entire grove, you need to figure out the spacing. How close should you plant your avocado tree to your house or your driveway? How far should the tree be from another fruit tree or a retaining wall? Can you plant an...
Heat tolerance of avocado varieties
When you see comparisons between avocado varieties, often discussed are the flower type, size of the tree and its fruit, peel color, and cold sensitivity. Rarely, however, do you get a clue as to a variety’s sensitivity to heat. (See, for example, Table 5 on page 30...
The Hass avocado tree: a profile
Everybody wants to beat Hass. The world over, breeders are looking for that golden ticket: to create a new avocado variety that has a combination of characteristics superior to Hass. There are some contenders. Who will eventually knock King Hass from the throne? This...
How to harvest avocados
The main question is: Should you just pull the avocados off the tree, or should you carefully clip the stems when you harvest avocados? Let me tell you what I do and explain why. Harvesting avocados by hand Whether my feet are on the ground or I’ve climbed up into a...
Will avocado fruitset in 2020 be like 1965?
I miss Bob Bergh. If you want to learn about avocado flowering and pollination, read everything that this longtime University of California researcher wrote. His studies were creative and useful, and his reporting was honest and skeptical. In short, you can apply...
Avocado variety profiles
Wondering which kind of avocado tree to plant in your yard? It can be hard to find reliable, concrete information that will help you choose a variety. So over the last few years I’ve written a number of posts and made some videos profiling different avocado varieties...
The Fuerte avocado tree: a profile
I was speaking with an avocado farmer from South Africa, and he asked me about my favorite avocados to eat. That’s hard to answer, I started. But I told him that recently I’d had some Kahalu’u and Jan Boyce avocados that were very good. I turned it back to him,...
The Bacon avocado tree: a profile
Below is my Bacon avocado tree, which is older than me. I don’t know who planted it, and it’s on public property. Okay, so this isn’t officially my Bacon avocado tree, but it feels like that sometimes because I’ve been picking its fruit and paying attention to...
White powder on avocado branches
Is it a disease? Is it a beetle boring into the tree? It looks scary when your avocado branches have volcanoes or streaks of white powder on them. What is that white stuff? It is the dried sap. When a branch is injured in some way, the sap runs just like your blood...Welcome
I’m Greg. My goal is to help others grow some food at home, with a focus on vegetables and fruits — especially avocados — in Southern California. I write a new “Yard Post” every Friday.
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