Growing Avocado - The best avocados to grow in your garden!

The avocado is a delicious healthy and easy to grow fruit in your backyard find out which variety is the best one to grow music theme 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 theme 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 theme 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 theme the gem avocado was developed at University of California at Riverside and its called gem after the name of that researcher who developed it *** 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 theme 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 theme 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 music