by Greg Alder | May 24, 2024 | Avocados |
In the fall of 2023, I girdled four avocado trees beyond the Hass that I usually girdle. The response from my Hass tree to girdling has been consistent and predictable, but the responses from these other varieties was variable. The Hellen and Lamb trees flowered...
by Greg Alder | May 17, 2024 | Avocados |
Rick Cadway hit the jackpot. In 2005, he planted a seed from a typical Hass avocado that he bought at Costco and it grew into a tree that makes world-class fruit. This is not what usually happens. Usually, when you grow an avocado tree from a seed you get a tree that...
by Greg Alder | May 3, 2024 | Avocados |
That’s a tarantula hawk feeding on a flower of my Edranol avocado tree. I watched it work that tree for five minutes, then fly to a Fuerte twenty feet away, and then come back to visit the Edranol flowers again. Ten minutes later, I found the tarantula hawk crawling...
by Greg Alder | Apr 26, 2024 | Avocados |
My avocado trees are in bloom. I can’t help but meander the yard at every chance to see which trees have male or female flowers, to identify insects that are visiting the flowers, to check for fruitlets forming, and so on. It’s a show with new episodes arriving daily....
by Greg Alder | Apr 20, 2024 | Avocados |
Can you mulch avocado trees too much? I’m sure you can, but I’ve never seen such a thing. And I’ve seen trees surrounded by deeeeeeep wood chips, like these on John Schoustra’s farm in Somis, Ventura County: The evidence of the beautiful leaves...
by Greg Alder | Apr 5, 2024 | Avocados |
Last October, I had the chance to visit the oldest Carmen avocado tree in the USA, and I thought I would come away with a better understanding of the variety. The tree had a metal USDA tag still attached to it, from when it was held in quarantine after the budwood had...
by Greg Alder | Mar 15, 2024 | Avocados |
I’m going to start harvesting from my Hass tree soon so I thought I’d show yield results from the girdles I did on it in the fall of 2022 and the flowers that are emerging from the girdles I did in the fall of 2023. On those recent girdles, I used narrower...
by Greg Alder | Mar 4, 2024 | Avocados |
Now that it’s March and it’s very unlikely there will be any temperatures cold enough to be damaging to avocados through the rest of this winter, I took a walk around my yard to make some observations about how different avocado trees fared during the...
by Greg Alder | Feb 9, 2024 | Avocados |
The spring of 2023 in California was abnormally cool, making avocado thrips abnormally populous. Thrips are tiny insects that chew on avocado fruit as the fruit is small, and this chewing becomes brown scarring. The thrips damage can result in large patches that some...
by Greg Alder | Jan 19, 2024 | Avocados |
You and I, we go to the nursery and buy our avocado trees. Not Brad. He is so well-rounded in avocado growing skills and knowledge that he has developed a new grove of hundreds of avocado trees from scratch. Starting from seed Brad planted over 200 avocado seeds,...
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