What you don't know about avocado trees!

Good morning 🤗!

How's your week going?

I hope it's going great. Personally, I'm happy because the other day, Javier gave us a tour of his avocado fields 🥑.

He told me a lot of super interesting things about avocado cultivation, so today I thought I'd tell you about the one that caught my attention the most.

Are you ready 🤔? Here we go!

Avocados are a very special fruit, and if you manage them well, you can harvest fresh avocados almost all year round!

This also happens to a lesser extent with other fruits; when clementines are finished, we already have clementines, so you can be harvesting different varieties of fresh mandarins for months.

Normally, the fields are separated by varieties, so you know that if you want to harvest, you go to one field, and if you want to prune, you go to another, that way you can organize your work.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw that Javi had all the varieties together in the same field... What a mess 🫣!

However, this is not because we are disorganized, but because to grow avocados, you need to have multiple varieties together.

But why is that? Do avocados need company so they don't feel lonely 😢?

Fortunately not, the reason is a little more complicated, but I'm sure you're familiar with it. Pollination 🐝!

I know what you must be wondering, "But wasn't pollination for flowers 🤔?"

And yes, flowers reproduce through pollination, but it turns out that not only avocado trees, but all fruit trees produce flowers 🌹🤯!

They are a little smaller than normal flowers, and when pollinated, they produce the fruit as we know it.

Orange trees, for example, produce an aromatic flower known as orange blossom, which smells like paradise. Being in the field with orange trees in bloom is a delight for the senses 🧡.

But let's get back to the topic, because if I start talking about oranges, I'll get lost 😅...

I'm telling you this because avocado varieties are divided into two types of flowers, type A and B for simplicity.

The funny thing is that the flowers coordinate according to their type, alternating between functioning as a male flower and a female flower day by day, as you can see in this diagram:

For this reason, it is important to have both types of flowers in your field, to make the bees' job as easy as possible, which means having different varieties of avocado together in the same field.

In other words, it's not as easy as planting an avocado. We have to make sure we have pollinators around. If I only planted Hass avocado (the bumpy one), it wouldn't produce anything!

And I wonder... How did farmers in the past manage to discover all this 🤔?

A real mystery, I would have given up a long time ago 😂...

What about you? How do you think they did it?

If you want to know more about this wonderful fruit, I have uploaded a blog with all the information I have found and that Javier gave me, you can take a look by clicking here.

Have a happy week!