Guest post: Avocado trees in Louisiana
A few days ago as my cousin Wade and I were catching up, he shared his excitement at having one of his three avocado trees finally bear fruit. My bloggy wheels started spinning, and I asked if he’d like to do a guest post here to share the experience with all of you. He thought it was a splendid idea, and even sent along pictures of the gorgeous avocados. Color me jealous.
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It all started about six years ago when my wife Robin and I were thinking about grade school science class. I remember when we used to put three toothpicks in an avocado seed and put it in a jar of water. We’d wait for what seemed like forever, then out popped a little tree. Robin and I decided to try it for ourselves.
The experiment worked, so we decide to throw the tree in the ground and see what happened. One year later, we did the same thing with another avocado seed. A year after that, we repeated the experiment. Not really knowing a lot about the trees (we still don’t), we planted them about three feet apart in a triangle. Slowly but surely (for what reasons - we don’t know), the second tree planted took off. It towered over the older tree. The third tree planted was the unfortunate one; the other two apparently took most of the water and sunlight. To this day, the youngest tree (about four years old now) is only about three feet tall. My best guess is the six-year-old is about 12 feet tall and the five-year-old is about 23 feet tall.
This year, Robin noticed blooms on the middle (the five-year-old) tree — thousands of tiny flowers popped out. Then, all of a sudden, those flowers turned into little balls. We had some rough wind and rain storms and that might have contributed to losing a lot of the little “balls.” Who knows? But slowly, some of the balls grew. Lord have mercy, we were getting avocados! We counted about 15 or so at one point. We found a small, marble-sized one on the ground every now and then, and of course had to try it.
Finally, from thousands of flowers, we had 12 (actually 11 1/2) large avocados. We still have one that is the size of a prune, but it’s high in the tree and doesn’t appear to be growing. We picked some and ate them — MMMMMMMM good. Tastes like avocados! We are looking forward to eating the rest, but can’t bear to pick them yet. I’m sure the stomach will prevail.
