How To Grow Avocados From A Store Bought Avocado Seed

today I'm going to show you two ways that you could start with a store-bought avocado seed and wind up with avocados the first method takes about 10 years before you see fruit the second method will have you producing fruit in year four you will need a pot and I recommend you start with these 1gallon Nursery pots but whatever pot you use make sure it's got a lot of holes for drainage potting soil I get mine by the truckload but you can just go to Home Depot and get the cheapest bag of potting soil you don't need anything special fertilizer yeah we use fertilizer I recommend either a 6-6-6 or today we're going to use 839 you can get all that stuff at Lowe's Home Depot or your local Garden Center next the fun part you need an avocado seed which means you get to eat an avocado oh that's yummy step one mix the soil into your pot now me I don't like to use a shovel I don't like to use gloves I like to get in there and feel what I'm doing I like to smell what I'm doing later in the day I like to know I was planting trees once you get your pot halfway full get yourself a scooper you could find these in like a can of Kool-Aid or something don't feel it all the way but almost up to the top and pour about half of what you put in there into the pot and I just want you to mix it up real good now this one maybe you do want to wear gloves like L of people don't want to get this stuff on their hands but I just shake it up so I just shook that fertilizer in there it's nice and mixed then I'm going to add more soil potting soil remember nothing special nothing magical and fill your pot up to the top but don't pack it in the whole point of potting soil is you want it to be loose in there so the roots can grow next I want you to take your seed from the avocado now this avocado might look a little strange to you this is the Monroe variety which are a lot big bigger about 12 times the size in fact of the common house variety you're probably used to in the grocery store it just happens I Grow Monroe and that's what I have on hand right now now examine the seed seeds have a top and seeds have a bottom and it's very easy to identify the bottom it's the little belly button or the concave part of the seed and the top is directly on the other side the opposite pole if you will and it comes to a little bit of a point sometimes the point is more pronounced you always want to plant your seed belly button down concave side down this side down so now go back to your pot and just make a little indentation a little bit of a hole you're not going to bury this seed just make a little bit of a hole in the middle of the pot place the seed again belly button down in the pot and then push the dirt so that about 1/3 or maybe 1/4 of the seed is exposed and the rest of it is down in the soil now I want you to take that remaining half2 cup or so of fertilizer and go around the edge of your pot don't go next to the seed go around the edge of the pot we go around the edge of the pot because too much fertilizer next to the stem will damage the roots watering the soil I just use is damp I've been storing it outside and we've had rain lately but your soil is going to be dry it's going to be fresh from a bag from Home Depot so you're going to need to water as soon as you plant your seed and avocados like to get a big drink and then a few days with nothing which is why I said your pot needs to have a lot of drainage so when you first plant your seed you're going to get your watering can give it a big long drink make sure you soak that soil make sure your water until it's dripping out the drain holes like crazy and you're going to put it away you're going to let it sit for 2 days come back and check now it's different for everyone things might be more humid where you live things might be more dry when where someone else lives and you just want to test the soil if there's dampness in the soil leave it alone if the soil feels dry repeat that process a nice big soaking drink till it really drains and then let it sit and that's all you need to do to water your baby avocado seed quick note many of you are familiar with this technique where you put three toothpicks into an avocado seed and place it in a clear glass of water belly button down to germinate the seed I think a lot of people people think this is necessary or they think it's a hack or they think it's a better technique than planting in soil but the fact is this is just a technique to teach little kids at school how seeds put out both a root system and choots and so by using the clear glass the kids get to see the roots developing while the tree also develops above the ground there's nothing magic or better about this technique than planting in soil then again if you watch my videos you know I always recommend that you plant way more than you expect to use so if you are following these instructions I suggest you not only do this for about six or seven seeds but if you want what the heck do do a few of them this way too let's talk about the ongoing care and maintenance of your avocado tree I already taught you how to water it and since your seeds in a pot with potting soil it's not going to get its nutrients from nature it's in a pot you're going to have to give it fertilizer about every 60 days and I want you to do that fertilizer around the edge of the pot if you're using this technique you'll see these little white Roots come out the bottom of the seed and start making their way down into the water of course if you have your seed in soil you're not going to see that and so you might look down at your seed every day and say oh it's not doing nothing sometimes you plant a seed you get a little stem like this within 2 weeks other times it could take two or more months but remember there's growth going on below the surface that you're not aware of essential important root Dev development but eventually that day will come you're going to see your first little Sprout and it's going to grow fast it's going to shoot up and it's going to start to put out little leaves like this guy here and that's when you need to take action you're going to need to do your first pruning and I know you first-time Growers hate taking a set of shears to your beloved avocado plant but I'm going to show you a technique that'll be a lot easier for you first timers all I want you to do is whenever you see a horn of New Growth come coming out the top of the tree I want you to just pinch it off like I did there let me show you that one more time when you see this little Horn of New Growth starting to pop out the top of the tree you don't even have to leave it get as big as I did as soon as you see that little horn peeking out just with your thumb and forefinger pinch it off and discard it that's pruning when you prune from the top that causes stem thickening and Branch development which is exactly what you want you want to grow your avocado tree like a bush not a telephone pole you want your tree to grow like a bush now if on the other hand you're feeling brave or you've got multiples and you want to experiment just go ahead and snip it at the stem somewhere but you always want to leave a few leaves for photosynthesis by the way talking about pruning if you can hear that background noise that's a giant machine pruning all the trees in my Grove right now all right you've been watering and fertilizing on regular intervals your sprout turned into a Little Seedling and eventually it's starting to look like a tree it's getting mature well keep this in mind whatever growth is happening above ground is also happening down in the pot the root system is growing too eventually you need to repot into a larger size and I recommend your next size up should be a three gon all right so to repot or up poot you're going to go back to Home Depot and get yourself another bag of potting soil Maybe you still have some left over from the last time but I assume if you're into this you've been you've been using that potting soil you're going to just put some in the the bottom not a lot until you can set your one gon pot so that it's flush with the three Gall see this here I'm setting that in there so it's flush the next thing you're going to do and this is why I recommend Nursery pots and not some kind of ornamental or ceramic thing is you can kind of like bend and break up and soft everything inside your pot so that when you go to remove it it just kind of comes out and then you dump it right into the larger pot another reason I like Nursery pots is sometimes that stuff gets really stuck in there and you can just cut the pot away and remove the tree that way now remember we filled this 3 gallon pot with just enough soil so that the one gallon sat flush so the the top of the tree is going to be flush brush with the top of the pot then you just fill the rest up with soil and again you always want to go to the tippy top with soil there's no reason to be cheap with the soil and don't pack it in you want this soil to be loose for drainage and so the roots can grow free just like you did when you planted the seed I want you to go around the edge of the pot the edge of the pot with just a little bit of fertilizer if after a few days your plant starts to look a little droopy a little sick don't worry that's called transplant shock and it's completely normal continue watering by testing the soil and if it's damp leave it alone if it's dry water it and go around the rim of the pot every 60 days with fertilizer as normal after 30 days resume your pruning regimen and after about a year you'll be ready to go to a 7 gallon pot and a year after that a 15 galon pot eventually your tree will start to outgrow the 15 gallon pot and that's when it's time to take it out and put it in the ground I put this guy in when he was about 3 and 1/2 4 ft high and he started to grow a little bit but you notice this tree did exactly what I told you we want this isn't growing up like a telephone pole this tree is growing out and it's growing round like a bush and if you follow my instructions that's how yours will grow also as far as ongoing care and maintenance once you get the tree in the ground my first tip is try to plant it right at the start or just before your rainy season you don't really want to plant these things before you go into your dry season similarly you want to test the soil if it's damp leave them go if it feels a little dry and it's not going to rain hit them with some irrigation and just like when they're in their pots you want to give them a nice big drink for a few hours and then let them dry out for a couple of days as for fertilizer the frequency goes down but the quantity goes up you're going to fertilize twice a year once in September once in February and you're going to go around the tree with 5 lbs of 839 fertilizer and again don't go too close to the stump you want to go around in a radius around the tree now you got to remember we're only in about year three or maybe four and an avocado tree does not start producing fruit until it achieves sexual maturity which could take 10 or more years so if you choose method one if you want to grow a tree all the way from seed at this point your tinkering is done your tree is in the ground you just have to water it regularly fertilize it twice a year and then wait and wait and wait and wait and maybe in year nine hopefully in year 10 gosh I sure hope it ain't year 12 but at some point your tree is going to start to flower and produce fruit now the thing about seedling fruit is we don't know what we're going to get we don't know if the fruit's going to taste delicious if it's going to taste yucky if it's going to produce every year if it's going to be big if it's going to be purple or green or red just like a human being they all have their own attributes but if you don't want to take that risk and if you don't want to take 10 years there's another technique you can use to grow your avocado fruit from a store-bought seed called grafting with grafting if I want more trees to grow these delicious Monroe avocados I go out to my Grove and I take a cutting from my already existing Monroe tree Tre and I clone the cuting here's a perfect specimen off of one of my monroe trees I'm going to fuse this cutting into this seedling I want you to do everything you did to grow the seedling I want you to put the seed in the potting soil with the fertilizer I want you to periodically prune the new growth Etc until eventually you get a tree that's about 18 to 24 in tall in the previous method you would have upgraded to the 3 gallon pot but instead of upgrading to the 3 gallon pot we're going to graft and the first thing we're going to do is Snip away the whole top of the tree and leave just this little stem and you want to pick a spot on the seedling to snip the stem where the diameter of the seedling is about the same as the diameter of your cutting I've got a lot of videos on my Channel about grafting and I've got some where I have some experts who do a really good job at it but essentially what you do is you take your cutting and you cut a wedge you cut a an angle off of each side one then you go to the other side two and you wind up with a wedge in your cutting like that see then you want to go to the seedling and cut a slit so you can insert the wedge into the slit so look right there you see I have a little slit in the seedling next you insert the wedge into the slit see that how they're in there like that then you close it up with tape and you see there I have fused the C cutting into the seedling next I'm going to take a wire hanger and bend it open straight make a little frame in my pot then we have these plastic bags that we put over the frame and I'll just tie that on there with grafting tape or you could use a rubber band and then once a week I want you to lift up the bag and check the soil if it's dry add a little bit of water you don't have to soak it like we did the last time just keep that soil nice and damp if it's damp check back at the next day eventually you'll start to see some new green growth sprouting out the top you might see flowers you might see buds you might see little leaves and here is what a successful graph looks like so here's the seedling portion of the tree then you see this scar right here and if you look real close you canot if you look close here you can not only see the split where we cut the split in the seedling and where the wedge went in you could also still see some evidence of the tape that's it's still kind of stuck there in the in the bark of the tree see that but this is a successfully grafted tree this is a Lara variety avocado so this was any old random seedling but the cutting came from a Lara avocado tree and what's growing now is a Lara tree which will give us Lara variety avocados and it'll only take 3 years to do so once your graph takes you'll continue with your regular pruning so you see here I have a horn of New Growth I'll pluck that out I'll look for others here's one here look it gone you'll continue with your fertilizing around the rim of the pot every 60 days you'll continue with your watering when the when the when the soil isn't damp and you will continue to transplant as the tree gets larger you see this is already in its three gallon pot eventually we'll go to a seven if we need to we'll go to the 15 or we'll just go out in the Grove and planet and then from that point on everything I said about the seedling also applies to the grafted tree now you know everything you need to know to grow avocados from the seed of a store-bought avocado you know the materials the timeline the techniques and you know the distinction between seed grown and grafted now if you'd rather skip all that Gro get right to the eaten go to guac farm.com guaf a RN .c that's where we sell our avocados we grow a wide variety of mangoes we got Mam sapadilla and tons of monstera deliciosa and if you don't eat fruit you can always get yourself a sleepy Lizard t-shirt it's Christmas time and I just got a box of Christmas cookies from my mom so I'm going to go inside and pig out on cookies while I do that you go to guac farm.com and I will see you on the next video

Channel: SleepyLizard

Views: 556,666

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Id: e1iNEyEUddU

Length: 17min 16sec (1036 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2023