The avocado is a delicious
healthy and easy to grow fruit in your backyard
find out which variety is the best one to grow
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So although you can start growing an avocado tree from a seed
it is best to just buy an avocado tree
or graft it if you know how to do that
avocados grown from seed may not
taste like their parent and can take as long as 15 years to form fruit
now while growing your avocado tree you will notice
that in about March to April the avocado tree will start flowering
and will produce these small fruits
this variety of avocado that you see here
is a dwarf variety called Gem avocado
And I will shortly get into the details of
all the different avocado varieties that you can grow
and which one is the best for your garden
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in about may you will see if that the tree has much more to lush growth
and remember that when growing avocado trees
you need to follow a very rigorous fertilizer schedule
which you can see on the screen right now this is how I usually
add fertilizer to my avocado tree and this has been doing a
great job us so far in the past few years
now here are the different avocado varieties that you will
see or that will be available to buy and each one has their own pros and cons
for example the Haas avocado is a commercially
grown avocado that can form a big tree
and have great tasting fruit
The Reed on the other hand is another different
variety of other avocado that you can grow
and the one that you see here the Gem Avocado
is in my opinion one of the best varieties to grow in your backyard
because its a dwarf tree
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so around June I saw that that there were a lot of crawling insects under my avocado tree
so what I have used to combat these insects
is called DE or diatomaceous earth
its a naturally occurring silica
its just a soil a kind of soil
that helps you protect your plants against crawling insects
so all you do is just spray it along the base of the plant
and then add a weed barrier and some mulch as you can see here
and that seems to do a great job of protecting
your avocado tree or pretty much any other tree
from crawling insects
June or July is also the time that you can see a lot of
fruits on your avocado
tree as you can see here that looks like a really nice
avocado being formed now although it might be tempting to
start harvesting you avocado at this stage
note that the avocado will get a lot larger than this
and there are several more months remaining before you can start
harvesting them
so just be patient and let
the avocado tree do its job of
producing more fruit and adding
volume to the fruits that it has already produced
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the gem avocado was developed
at University of California at Riverside
and its called gem after the name of that researcher who developed it
Gey E Martin and the gem avocado really excells as an avocado variety
And it has several advantages over other avocados
some of your avocados might have a little bit of a bruise to it
the one that we're harvesting right now has a little bit of a bruise
but that should be okay
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So its about October through December that your avocados will really start
becoming bigger in volume
and you can see the one that we have harvested here is a pretty big one
and its dark green and pigmented right now
and that's the time to harvest them and avocados never
ripen on the tree so please note that if you were wondering
whether your avocado will ripen on the tree they do not
an avocado always stays raw on the tree
so if you did not want to ripen and eat the avocado
the best place to leave it is on the tree and it should remain
thru winter on the tree intact
so as you can see these avocados are formed in clusters here
and the way the clusters are formed in the Gem avocado
its very well protected from the elements as you can see
and the avocados are pretty big sized
and the beauty about the gem avocado is that
the flesh of the avocado is much larger
because the seed is slightly smaller compared to the Haas avocado
and when we cut open this avocado you will find this out
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so the gem avocado grows best
in areas having whether similar to Southern California
which is San Luis Obispo counties
thru San Diego County so as long as you have weather
closer to this kind of weather you can easily grow the Gem avocado
and the shape of the fruit looks really nice compared to all the avocados
nice fleshy fruit with
the large volume of
the avocado pulp in each of each of these fruits
and they will hang on to the tree
pretty much all thru winter we've had avocados hanging onto the tree
until the end of December very easily
so all you need to do is harvest these avocados
every week every two weeks as much as you want
and ripen them on the shelf
Now one of the limitations of the Haas avocado as
well as the Reed
avocado is the problem of are alternate bearing
which means that it bears heavily one year
and then bears very less the next year
now the Gem avocado
the beauty of the plant is that it bears
a lot of fruit every year so every year you can expect a really big harvest from
this dwarf avocado tree
and look at how less space it takes how much of less space compared to a
big avocado tree it takes
there are a bunch of avocados in this plant I would
estimate the number to be like around 50
for this plant and this avocado
plant or avocado tree is about three or four years old
and it's about four feet in height
and as you can see for the size of the tree there that are a lot of avocados in
a lot of big avocados here so this is how to look like when they're on the v
and after ripening them on the shelf
you can see that the skin has turned into a dark burgundy color
and that means that it's ready to eat so let's chop up
these avocados and see how they look like so first up you can see that the
shape is a little different
its tear drop shaped
and
and let's open up this avocado
very smooth and buttery inside just like all the other avocados
and as you can see the seed is a little smaller than the Haas avocados
and the flesh has a lot of
buttery avocado fruit
in it just scoop off the avocado
flesh from the sides
that's the seed
decent sized seed, not very big
let's scoop up the remaining avocado as well
Now remember that the dark green part of the avocado that's next to the skin
is actually the healthiest part of the avocado
But in general you can't go
wrong with the avocado its a very delicious
fruit to eat so I hope you enjoyed this video on growing avocados
and I hope you got an idea of the different avocado varieties that you can
grow
and I'll see you again soon happy gardening
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