How to grow avocado from seed

Do you know you can use the seed of a just eaten avocado to start an avocado tree? You often hear or read that it's a useless exercise because the trees take between seven to ten years to produce fruit, but I still do it. I'm not interested in speed. All natural things take time. If you were to buy a grafted avocado tree today and plant it, it would take a couple of years to produce decent avocados. So if you have the land, and you love avocados, why not grow a few from seed and see how it goes. You're not losing anything.

This seedling avocado is two years old.

When we moved to the home we live in now, there was an old avocado tree full of avocados in the backyard. A few months after moving in, the council used our backyard as the beginning of the installation of sewers in our town and the machinery moving over the tree's roots killed it. Avocados hate having their roots compressed, interfered with or excessive moisture. Since then I've bought a few grafted trees but everyone of them died from Phytophthora and at over $30 per tree, it hurts. A seedling tree grown from a seed might take longer before fruit form and it may even die, but I'm not throwing away $30+ each time I have another go at home grown avocados.

Avocados are categorised as either A or B. Each flower is bisexual and opens twice, once as a female and once as a male. You can produce avocados with one tree, but you'll increase your yield a lot if you have more than one tree, preferably one A and one B type. Avocados will grow anywhere there is no frost and even in frosty areas you can grow them in a large pot that can be brought inside. They also make an excellent and lush indoor plant. If you're in a cold area, Bacon is the best variety for you.

Type A - Gwen, Hass, Lamb Hass, Pinkerton, Reed, Rincon, Secondo and Wurtz.
Type B - Bacon, Edranol, Fuerte, Llanos Hass, Ryan, Sharwil, Shepard and Zutano.

We love avocados but they're quite expensive so we limit ourselves. We have a generous neighbour up the road - organisedcastle, and she sometimes brings us a few from her tree. The avos I love the most though come from my friend Meryl because she grows the magnificent Reed avocado. Reed is round, creamy and large. Just one will make a big bowl of guacamole. In my humble opinion, I think it's the best tasting avo. You rarely see them on sale in the supermarkets because they don't travel well but often the organic boxes and some CSAs carry them. We had a few of of Meryl's Reeds in early autumn and I've now got a sprouted seed. It will soon join my other seed-grown avocado that is now about two years old (photo above).

It's easy to sprout a seed. Simply wash it and put it in a small container with the bottom of the seed in the water. Change the water every few days. Soon the roots will emerge, then the top shoot. When the seedling is about 10 inches tall, snip off the top half inch of the top shoot to encourage the seedling to develop side shoots.  When there are leaves and the seedling looks healthy, plant it in soil.  You can plant the seed straight into soil too instead of sprouting it first but I like sprouting them on the window sill in the kitchen.

This is the sprouted Reed seed. It's still about two months away from planting out. 

The most important part of growing avocados in the ground is to provide excellent drainage. They love deep, sandy soils and need to be kept watered during hot weather - a bucket of water every two days in summer. If you're mulching, use hay or straw but keep it away from the trunk because it will encourage disease.

Mindful of the failures I've had in the past, I'm planting these in a different way.  We had quite a high annual rainfall here so I want to keep the avocado's roots out of the sometimes flooding rain we get. If the roots stay in water for 48 hours the tree will probably die. I'm going to plant these in large pots with extra large drainage holes in the base and sit them in full sun where they'll grow in pots in top quality potting mix and manure. I am hoping the roots grow out of the base of the pots and into the soil - that will give the tree increased vigour and fruit growing ability but it will keep the main root ball out of the wet clay soil. We'll see how this goes. So far the score is Avocado 2 vs Rhonda 0.

Varieties of avocado