Avocado Tree Care 101: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners

hey this is cameron welcome back to the busy gardener channel today we are going to talk about a fruit that is notoriously difficult to grow in the orchard it's not even really thought of as a fruit it's creamy it's dreamy it's delicious and it is of course the avocado in this video i'm going to talk with you how to plant an avocado how to care for an avocado how to harvest an avocado if you stay tuned at the end i'm going to tell you which kind of avocado i think is the best option for most home growers let's get busy we have a an absolute love affair with the avocado commercially it's been grown at levels it never even has before and it's because there's so many ways to enjoy this thing there's like guacamole i love taking a chip and just getting a huge scoop of tasting guacamole and then people have avocado toast and they cut it and put it on top of eggs or they take and you know carve out the avocado the middle and put in chicken salad in the middle i mean any number of ways actually right now before the video goes on why don't you tell me your favorite way to eat an avocado put that in the comments below i'd love to see that and get some ideas the thing is is the avocado is a really difficult tree to grow um it's a subtropical it's very sensitive subtropical and so that's where i want to give you the backyard grower a few tips on how to best grow an avocado in your setting so that way you have a success and then can enjoy avocado for years and years to come first we're going to talk about planting how you plant your avocado is going to go a long way in terms of avoiding some of the problems that we have now we personally have three avocados that we've planted we have this haas avocado right here and it is pronounced hass after rudolph hass the original avocado tree is like 20 miles from where we're at which is pretty cool and then i also have this pinkerton avocado and also this wurtz avocado which is sometimes called little cotto and these are finally doing well but i've had some trouble here i've had to replace this house avocado two other times the pinkerton i've had to replace it one other time and you can't see them because they're just kind of sticks now maybe you see it there i had a reed avocado and a bacon avocado also planted turns out they were a little too close given how big these trees can get all that to say it can be a real challenge to grow an avocado and i have faced and have screwed this up and i want to share with you what i've learned so that way you don't have to cry the same way i have okay first let's talk about planting so planting initially has to do with choosing the right site for it the avocado is a tree that naturally will get really really big really really tall and as you know if you're doing a backyard orchard the temptation is to keep them really short because i keep you know all my deciduous trees at about eight feet or no higher than i can reach the avocado is a little bit different than that even though it's eventual height can get to 40 50 feet in fact my neighbor over there has an avocado and that thing they topped it and that thing already is 40 some feet we're not going to let it grow that tall and yet we do want to let it get to 12 or 15 feet tall because the avocado has such a long harvesting season usually months long and they actually say the best place to store an avocado is on the tree itself they don't ripen until you pull them off and i'll talk about that a little more later and so i want these to be tall so i've chosen a site that is on the northern part of our property so that way as we let them get 12 or 15 feet tall they're not shading out any trees that are behind them so choosing your site that is not going to shade anything out and that is also able to get sufficient sun is going to help you to get a good avocado crop another thing we want to talk about is soil this is actually i think the number one reason why my avocados have failed in the past is that the soil right here happens to be very poor draining avocados want a fast draining soil something that doesn't stay waterlogged avocados have any number of things where they can drown those roots if they're in continuous moisture and dampness if they're wet you can develop root rot which will just kill your tree so you want a fast draining soil now one way that avocado growers get around this sort of thing is by growing their avocados on mounds and so where you see that avocado is planted a few inches above grade many times people will plant it six seven eight inches above where the normal soil level is and then they'll just mound soil up around the tree and that way any excess water and moisture will roll off so you want to ideally plant that above grade and you can always just back fill with additional soil so that's a really great way to plant it another thing that avocados need and really benefit from is a healthy mulch layer you know me if you watch this channel i'm always talking about mulch well a wood chip mulch is going to do a couple of things it's going to regulate the soil temps so that they don't get baked in the heat of the sun it's also going to allow air to pass through into the soil while retaining some moisture so it's going to prevent some of that massive evaporation so it'll keep some moisture in the soil and keep these trees happy and lush now a final thing that i would talk about is protecting your avocado from the sun this is another thing that usually sinks first-time avocado growers is that the avocado is a sub-tropical so this type of tree has gotten used to growing in a jungle where you know the seed starts and it comes up and there's already an existing canopy where it's kind of making its way up through very dappled sunlight well what do we do we go and we buy it at a nursery where it's among all of its other little avocado friends we take it and then we plant it in the middle of our yard and then the sun beats on it from every angle and then they die and we wonder why and one of the reasons for that is that the avocado has this very sensitive bark here you notice that there's like a a green and this is a semi photosynthetic layer here where it's able to actually photosynthesize a bit but that also makes it very susceptible to sunburn one of the things that i recommend doing upon planting like immediately and definitely before spring is out it's going to be 90 something today this is going to begin to burn if we don't do something about it is to go and use a high quality white wash like iv organics i'll link to that in the description you want to make sure that your tree is covered and protected so that it doesn't sunburn so that way you can develop a nice healthy bark like you see here as opposed to this type of sunburned bark that you see right here you notice how that is just brown and burned so white washing your tree is going to improve its health it's going to keep it from getting as stressed and you want to do that ideally when you first plant your tree and then any new growth any of that tender green growth that comes out you're going to want to whitewash as well something that gets neglected as you're talking about avocados is the fact that avocados generally will need a second avocado in order to bear fruit avocados have what are called a flowers and b flowers or an a-type tree or a b-type tree and that has to do with the time of day that their little petals and flowers open and so in some of the cooler climates you definitely need a second tree you need an a and a b and you can look up charts depending on the kind that you're looking to grow to see whether you've got an a or b having both will almost guarantee that you're going to get fruit now in southern california that's less of an issue because in our climate the tree kind of turns into an a and b at the same time the flowers will open and will help pollinate itself so in southern california avocados are generally considered to be self-fruitful but if you want to be rock solid you choose an a and a b avocado let's talk about a few ways you want to care for your avocados you want these guys to be happy and that's it when you're planting this stuff is working together with your trees some of the ways you're going to care for your avocado that i'm going to talk about are how you water it how you fertilize it how you cover it among a couple of other things avocado trees are a type of tree that do need a lot of water they consume more than most of the other crop fruit that are there and that's why droughts in southern california have really impacted the avocado industry but they do need a lot of water and so what i have here is a drip system set up so that way it's giving consistent watering with a nice long deep watering so that way the roots get plenty of water and are able to take it up and having it on a drip system gives that water over a long period of time allows it to truly get down there as opposed to just flooding it with a hose if you have some sort of trough then that can often get that to the roots but the problem is the roots will often go out a lot further than whatever your your trough is and so i like for the backyard to use this drip system to give consistent effective deep watering that being said you don't want to over water your avocados in that you want them to have the opportunity to dry out a little bit before you then come back with another deep watering they're similar to citrus in that way okay let's talk about pruning your avocado tree of course you're going to be pruning out any wood that's dead or diseased or dying but outside of that avocados you want to allow to remain as lush as possible the more canopy you've got covering the inside of that tree the better and there are a couple of considerations one is that oftentimes avocados will put their fruit out at the edge of their branches you see how this pinkerton all this flowering is all at the edge of the branches so with that being said any type of cuts you're going to do are going to potentially eliminate some of these things now when you do make pruning cuts on an avocado you don't want to come through and do these thinning cuts where you're cutting off at the base of a tree if you can help it because then that's going to allow in more sunlight if anything you want like on this house avocado to come through and maybe make a tipping cut if you're needing to adjust for size another thing too is you do want to once you find the eventual height of your tree you want to encourage that bushy growth and not that long leggy growth so on this pinkerton if i let's say that this was near my eventual height i would make a cut maybe down here somewhere and that will encourage some additional bushy growth here as opposed to it wanting to just go vertically like these trees may sometimes want to do so ultimately the size of the tree is up to you so you're wanting to maintain your eventual height but you're wanting it as you kind of pruning on the outside to maintain the shape and size of the tree more so than creating those thinning cuts you never want an avocado to be a vase shape thing that's letting in tons of sunlight into the center of the canopy you always want it to be kind of a shrub type of look a bush type of look really similar to how this has looks okay let's talk about covering all right as i mentioned earlier avocado trees need to be protected from the sun especially when they're young why washing a tree is by far the fastest most effective most consistent way that that's going to be protected but for very young tree something that i built is something like a shade cloth frame shade cloth is just some type of material that only lets in partial sunlight and it comes in different percentages of sunlight that it allows through but what i did especially is this little cotto was young was that i would have created the shape the shade frame to just come over and sit over the top of it and i can't quite put it down because this tree's got a lot bigger but the shade frame made it so that during the hottest parts of the day this tree would be protected and so this type of tree whether it be for an avocado or any other tree would be a great idea but definitely needed for something like an avocado another thing i want to point out with this words avocado this little cotto and which is true about all avocados is that you want the leaves to remain on the ground this is what naturally happens in the rain forest or the jungle wherever these are growing in these tropical areas and so this leaf litter down here you want to stay down here avocados they will utilize the nutrients that break down from this and it's been said that if you don't allow this to happen then you've got to come back and feed these leaves with some sort of foliar spray and rather than going through all of that hassle just leave your avocado leaves on the ground tell your gardener to stay away from them with the rake don't you do it so you just leave that there [Music] okay let's talk about harvesting avocados are different than other types of fruit like your stone fruit and apples and things like that where you just walk up and look at it and kind of squeeze it and take a bite of it and it's good avocados ripen off of the tree they will not ripen when they're on the tree again that's why they say the best place to store an avocado is just to leave it on the tree until you're ready to to use it and then anticipating a few days it usually takes a few days for it to ripen so there's never going to be a time where you walk over pull off an avocado and be able to use it for guacamole well how do you even know when you're supposed to pull it off of the tree well there are two main ways one is know the general harvest time for your particular type of avocado i know you might think that there's just one type of avocado and that's this hass avocado which turns dark when it's roughly ripe and has this really bumpy hard exterior but there are actually many types of avocados that are available to the backyard grower so know your particular avocados harvest season and then and when this house avocado theoretically ought to be ripe and so what you do is you take and you pick it off of the tree this is our one avocado and you go and you ripen it generally as a test before you harvest all of them don't harvest all of them test them first you take and you put this in like a paper bag of some kind a brown paper bag maybe and you let it uh just ripen over a few days and you come back and when it's firm to the touch i mean this is rock hard right now but when it's firm to the touch but gives a little bit that's when you know that it's generally going to be ready and you want to test it like that because if this is picked too early let's say this is april right now but let's say i tried to pick this in december when this was still on the tree also on the tree what happens is it never actually ripens it just turns rubbery it kind of shrivels and turns rubbery as opposed to softening and being really tasty so try it out with a couple before you go and strip your whole tree all right let's talk about fertilizing avocados feeding them you know generally for keeping trees at a smaller height especially these deciduous trees we cut the nitrogen way back so that the phosphorous potassium are you know three four times as much as the amount of nitrogen because we don't want to encourage that boomy growth that isn't true for subtropicals either for avocado or for citrus in fact you'll often see avocado and citrus having its own type of fertilizer at the store and that's because these require more nitrogen they're way more leafy they have a canopy that is is very necessary for their health and so using a higher nitrogen or what we would call like a balanced fertilizer is appropriate for avocados just like it is for citrus so whether it be a 10 10 10 or 15 15 15 as long as those numbers are equal the first number the end the nitrogen is roughly equal to what the second two numbers are that type of balance is what you're looking for for your avocados that'll support that leafing growth as well as supporting the fruiting and the root health of the tree okay here it is my recommendation for the backyard grower if you're going to buy one avocado tree the one that i think is going to be probably the easiest for you and require the least amount of maintenance and that is the wurtz avocado the worst avocado is eventually only going to get 10 or 12 feet tall and so that allows you to have an avocado tree that you're just going to allow to grow to its natural height but it also has fruit that's really similar to the house avocado and so it's a very familiar fruit it also that because of that has a long harvest period i think the words is something like from april all the way through october or something like that works avocado i think if you're gonna plant one avocado and if you don't have a specific one in mind i think the worx avocado is an excellent option for the backyard grower so growing an avocado can feel so scary and intimidating it takes what forever for them to start fruiting and then there's so much that can go wrong along the way that's why in this video we talked about how to plant your avocado how to care for your avocado how to harvest your avocado if you like this video why don't you hit like why don't you subscribe to the busy gardener channel would love it whether you've got one avocado that you're trying to grow in your orchard or 500 until next time stay busy [Music]

Channel: The Busy Gardener

Views: 114,191

Keywords: how to care for avocados, how to care for avocado plant, how to care for avocado tree, how to care for avocado tree in pot, how to care for avocado trees in california, how to care for avocado tree indoors, how to care for avocado plant in winter, avocado tree, planting avocado tree, hass avocado farming, pruning avocado tree, how to fertilize avocado, how to plant avocado tree, caring for avocado

Id: jN0IVKdmQPg

Length: 16min 33sec (993 seconds)

Published: Tue May 11 2021