Girdling Lamb avocado trees to get fruit every year

While I like many things about the Lamb variety of avocado (one of which is how late the fruit can hang on the tree), one of its weaknesses is that it tends to make a lot of avocados one year but little the next. Alternate bearing, this is called.

So a handful of years ago, I began asking seasoned avocado growers if they had tried girdling their Lamb trees. Girdling, where you cut a shallow ring around a branch, has long been practiced on avocado trees to manipulate their flowering and fruiting. Girdling can make some avocado trees fruit every year. And some farmers girdle their thousands of Hass avocado trees every year in order to achieve this.

But the growers I asked said they never girdled their Lambs. One farmer specifically noted that he didn’t think the Lamb variety was vigorous enough to handle the stress of girdling.

In the fall of 2023, I decided to find out for myself. My Lamb tree had been planted in 2013, and over the decade it had oscillated between years with lots of fruit and years with none, and I was eager to see if I could even that out. So on November 3, I girdled a major limb.

Results

The following spring, in 2024, that limb flowered profusely and set fruit well. Today, June 27, 2025, that fruit is nearing maturity, almost ready for harvest. It looks like there’s about 100 Lambs to pick.

After seeing the response of the girdled branch throughout last summer, I decided to girdle the other half of the tree that fall, on November 3, to be precise.

The girdled limbs flowered and set fruit this spring (2025).

Going forward

Girdling is proving effective on my Lamb avocado tree to get fruit every year rather than every other year – so far. It’s only two years in a row.

I will girdle it again this fall and see if I can keep the pattern going for a third year.

The tree is at its ultimate size. It’s about 8 feet wide and 14 feet tall. It can carry 200-250 avocados in a single year, max, at this size. So my aim is to get 100-125 avocados every year rather than up to 250 avocados one year but zero the next.

Have a look at this video of my Lamb tree and its girdles and avocados today:

See my profile of the Lamb variety of avocado tree here.

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