Care and Harvest of Avocado Tree

[MexSeekin]

I recently acquired a home in Chapala with a mature avocado tree in the back yard that is producing a large quantity of fruit.  I want to make sure that the crop does not go to waste; however, I know nothing about how to attend to the tree.  Can anyone here advise me on how to determine when it's the right time is to harvest the fruit?  (By the looks of things, I'm guessing it should be fairly soon.)  And should all of the avocados be harvested around the same timeframe before they spoil?

Might there be anything else I should be considering doing around now to protect crop?

Many thanks.

[Yo1]

You can harvest them when they are full sized but hard.  They will ripen off the tree.  Give them away to your friends and neighbors if you have too many.  Or you can mash the ripe fruit, add a little lemon or limon juice and freeze in usable portions.

[CHILLIN]

We havent experience bird or bug damage, unlike mangos ,peaches and spagetti squash. For those you can buy over the internet, very fine mesh nylon mesh bags with a pull tie. These stop stop insects and varmints.

The leaves of avocado are also used in some Mexican dishes.

https://www.amazon.com/mesh-bags-drawstring/s?k=mesh+bags+drawstring

[Natasha]

On 7/23/2021 at 2:05 PM, MexSeekin said:

.  Can anyone here advise me on how to determine when it's the right time is to harvest the fruit?  (By the looks of things, I'm guessing it should be fairly soon.)  And should all of the avocados be harvested around the same timeframe before they spoil?

https://harvesttotable.com/how-to-plant-grow-and-harvest-avocados/

This site is quite informative about harvesting, and a few others things.  Your photo looks a lot like the Hass variety, and if this is the case, fruit can be left on the tree as long as 8 months, picked a few at a time, brought indoors, wrapped in newspaper, and checked daily.  Or you can store in the fridge for quite some time and then ripen at your schedule.  There is, however, a time limit after which fruits will not be as tasty.  DO NOT pick all at once!!

The one thing you really need to know is they are shallow rooted and if you overwater you can kill them.  Been there.  Done that.(Well, landlord's handyman did.... but I would have stopped him sooner if I'd known)  Enjoy!!

[CHILLIN]

Avocado and Papaya are pretty well available year round here. Right now they are harvesting Mangos and Tuna fruit. If they wait too long to harvest mangos, they get infested with worms. Tuna fruit, is a delicious Jalisco favorite. It is fruit from Prickly Pear Cactus. If you find some in the wild, bright red when ripe, get someone to show you how to handle them. If you touch the outside fuzzy skin, like Kiwi, you will itch for weeks! You have to burn off the fuzz over a flame.

Fresh Mangos and Tuna, worth seeking out. I prefer the green mangos, just starting to turn red and yellow. Papaya is good green, shredded for salads, etc. Actually most Papaya consumed in the world is green. Papaya is difficult to grow, because you need one male plant, for ten females. That is a lot of Papaya!

 

[Stream]

1 hour ago, Natasha said:

https://harvesttotable.com/how-to-plant-grow-and-harvest-avocados/

This site is quite informative about harvesting, and a few others things.  Your photo looks a lot like the Hass variety, and if this is the case, fruit can be left on the tree as long as 8 months, picked a few at a time, brought indoors, wrapped in newspaper, and checked daily.  Or you can store in the fridge for quite some time and then ripen at your schedule.  There is, however, a time limit after which fruits will not be as tasty.  DO NOT pick all at once!!

The one thing you really need to know is they are shallow rooted and if you overwater you can kill them.  Been there.  Done that.(Well, landlord's handyman did.... but I would have stopped him sooner if I'd known)  Enjoy!!

 

On 7/23/2021 at 9:05 AM, MexSeekin said:

I recently acquired a home in Chapala with a mature avocado tree in the back yard that is producing a large quantity of fruit.  I want to make sure that the crop does not go to waste; however, I know nothing about how to attend to the tree.  Can anyone here advise me on how to determine when it's the right time is to harvest the fruit?  (By the looks of things, I'm guessing it should be fairly soon.)  And should all of the avocados be harvested around the same timeframe before they spoil?

Might there be anything else I should be considering doing around now to protect crop?

Many thanks.

Remember what Natasha says. You can leave the fruit on the tree for around a year gravity and plant health willing.

Planting an avocado from seed it's around 8 years till thee first fruit. Yah long time. I'd look for a new breed called GEM or JIM avocado that only grows to 6-8 foot high producing a round avocado. The bumps will be a yellowish color. The 1/4 honey with 3/4 water spritzing flower areas works great to assure bees pollinate plenty of the flowers and there are lots of flowers when the plants bloom. Be watchful like having routine to see if flower buds are starting. There's an A and B type plant with the two having morning or afternoon periods of flower openings and closing. Tough game  Fantastic plants.

Avocado trees can get sunburned from heat and sun. If a freak heatwave hits try shading the tree. Some California growers were using a whitish stuff to spray on the trees to block the sun during heatwaves. 

[AngusMactavish]

1 hour ago, Stream said:

 

Planting an avocado from seed it's around 8 years till thee first fruit.

There is another reason to not plant from seed, one much more disappointing.

 

[Stream]

6 hours ago, AngusMactavish said:

There is another reason to not plant from seed, one much more disappointing.

 

Sure enough. I wouldn't be as drastic on the flavors though. The A and B variety of bloomers makes the mixing and it's tough odds on the phenotype. There is a silver solution for getting a plant to flip out genetically so to say and produce seeds from a female flower of itself There's a lab in India good at genetics that makes and sells lots of stuff even stuff for getting a piece of a plant to grow from a part of plant placed in it. Those solutions are not the kind of thing anyone would want to be exposed to for darn good reasons. It figures the California companies selling seeds are using one of the methods mentioned above or have controlled greenhouses for pollinating. Not all of them are approved for export. The GEM seeds come with a stipulation that the seeds can't be used for commercial purposes unless paying on a different plan I didn't care to ask for.

Grafting and trimmings is a great way. The little only ladies are masters of wiggling trimmings out of friends and neighbors. A late friend had a double flower hibiscus plant he got from outside a medical clinic after asking for a trimming. Plant grew up then people walking by knowing that they were seeing a rare flower variety would ask him for a trimming. 

[cedros]

On 7/24/2021 at 3:46 PM, CHILLIN said:

Avocado and Papaya are pretty well available year round here. Right now they are harvesting Mangos and Tuna fruit. If they wait too long to harvest mangos, they get infested with worms. Tuna fruit, is a delicious Jalisco favorite. It is fruit from Prickly Pear Cactus. If you find some in the wild, bright red when ripe, get someone to show you how to handle them. If you touch the outside fuzzy skin, like Kiwi, you will itch for weeks! You have to burn off the fuzz over a flame.

Fresh Mangos and Tuna, worth seeking out. I prefer the green mangos, just starting to turn red and yellow. Papaya is good green, shredded for salads, etc. Actually most Papaya consumed in the world is green. Papaya is difficult to grow, because you need one male plant, for ten females. That is a lot of Papaya!

 

"Papaya plants grow in three sexes: male, female, and hermaphrodite. The male produces only pollen, never fruit. The female produces small, inedible fruits unless pollinated. The hermaphrodite can self-pollinate since its flowers contain both male stamens and female ovaries." I have always found them easy to grow-both at the coast and in the mountains.

Mangos can be tricky to grow as they need to be sprayed a number of times (especially the yellow Manila ones) or they will get wormey. I found the Paradiso variety (red/green and larger than the yellow ones) aren't as suseptible to getting wormy. Leaf cutting ants like climbing up the trunk and eating the flowers so you won't get much fruit unless you put sticky tape around the trunk.

[Natasha]

18 hours ago, CHILLIN said:

. Papaya is difficult to grow, because you need one male plant, for ten females. That is a lot of Papaya!

No it isn't! And you don't need to KEEP 10 females as long as you (normally) have one of each.  But you do have to learn the difference in the  flowers to tell the sex of the tree. I got super lucky with the last one I started from seed. ... it's a hermaphrodite so not not only self-pollinates, it also produces long, lean fruits instead of huge roundish ones. Funny thing is I was down to two plants, one being the stronger looking, but then that plant got injured so I reluctantly cut it off at ground level, and low and behold the survivor had both male and female flowers.😁  Produces like crazy!

Today we will cut it off about 4 feet from the ground as it's gotten tall and weak, and encourage the one side branch already fruiting plus more to come form below. My friend Mr. Google says  this works, so will follow instructions and cross my fingers.

[Natasha]

17 hours ago, Stream said:

Planting an avocado from seed it's around 8 years till thee first fruit.

You'd be lucky to get fruit that soon (some can take 20 years from seed) BUT you are NOT guaranteed to get the "same" tree.  That's why avocados are grafted.... the variety you want on a strong base plant.    Nursery-bought plants will have that.  Look for one where the graft is quite low, looks really well grown into itself and is not bent at a strange angle, so that trunk will be strong as the tree matures. You'll get fruit in 2-3 years, depending.....

[Stream]

I think they know we are talking about them. 

[AndyPanda]

On 7/23/2021 at 2:18 PM, Yo1 said:

You can harvest them when they are full sized but hard.  They will ripen off the tree.  Give them away to your friends and neighbors if you have too many.  Or you can mash the ripe fruit, add a little lemon or limon juice and freeze in usable portions.

I would add that they will not ripen on the tree; therefore, you have to pluck them. Eventually on the tree they will harden and go bad or be pecked to death.

[bmh]

The leaves of avocado that are used in the Mexican cooking are the leaves of the tree that bears very small fruit and the entire fruit is eatable skin included, it has a slight anise flavour. You do not use the leaves of the tree that is in the picture.

I also have an advocado tree and my dogs take care of eating all the fruit that drops.. They fight over the advocados.  We harvest some fruit but very little in comaraaison to what it produces.

[traderspoc]

Took six years with seed, I pick avocados from Sept to Feb,  they  ripen  off the tree   I trim my tree every year keep about 18 ft high but very wide. This last year tree 10 years old produced over 120 avocados

 

[cedros]

11 hours ago, AndyPanda said:

I would add that they will not ripen on the tree; therefore, you have to pluck them. Eventually on the tree they will harden and go bad or be pecked to death.

The Lake Chapala garden guide says to pick them when full sized, but not soft. 

[CHILLIN]

21 hours ago, bmh said:

The leaves of avocado that are used in the Mexican cooking are the leaves of the tree that bears very small fruit and the entire fruit is eatable skin included, it has a slight anise flavour. You do not use the leaves of the tree that is in the picture.

I also have an advocado tree and my dogs take care of eating all the fruit that drops.. They fight over the advocados.  We harvest some fruit but very little in comaraaison to what it produces.

Brigitte, is this the Criollo avocado? My gardener says they taste great.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avocado

[bmh]

The one used for cooking have very small fruit with smooth skin and an anise flavor. You eat the skin in those. I do not know what they are called, I just know what is being used in Oaxaca when I help out with the cooking.