Raise your hand if you have ever poked three toothpicks into
the pit of an avocado
and suspended it over a glass of water. Then, after weeks on
a sunny windowsill, watched as a white root grew into the water, and a slender
shoot stretched up towards the sun. If you were lucky, a few leaves would open
up at the top and a network of roots would fill the glass. If you weren’t
lucky… well, never mind.
So, by now, your attention would have wandered to more
dynamic activities, especially since the growth rate of a windowsill avocado in
North America would have it producing an avocado right around the time you
would be applying for Medicare. Your mom probably got tired of cleaning around
it, and when she “forgot” to water it, declared the project finished as she gathered
up the dead leaves and threw the whole mess into the trash.
Once, I actually took it to the next level, and put the
roots into dirt, sadly watching as all the leaves fell off (water roots don’t
do well in dirt, I learned later). The spindly stem stretched for the light,
though, putting up a growth spurt that tried to get it closer to the sun. Some
leaves might have appeared, but by now the season was shifting, and the
shortening New England days simply did not have hours of the light the tropical
avocado needed to grow.
My situation has changed now; I live in avocado country,
where avocado trees grow in fields and backyards, along streets or in parks,
but seldom on windowsills. I also have an abundance of avocado pits because
Salvadoran guacamole is excellent (made with hard boiled eggs, and not a lot
else). Thinking how an avocado seed might get started if it just fell from a
tree, I decided to just bury it into the dirt and see what happened. The
combination of hot sun and warm moist earth worked its magic and about two
weeks, the seed had cracked open and a shoot emerged, soon to be crowned with a
few tiny leaves.
photo
Eventually it was about 18 inches tall with a nice crown of
big leaves. The location was not ideal, however, and I decided to move it out
of the herb garden and put it in a pot. Guess what? After the transplant, all
the leaves fell off, and it grew up another foot with a few leaves on top.
Clearly, avocados do not take kindly to being moved around!
So I devised another plan: I’d plant an avocado grove in a
shallow pot by just burying a bunch of pits in the dirt. In about 25 years of
bonsai pruning, I might have something!
I’m going to print out this link for inspiration:
Also go here to learn an interesting tidbit of avocado lore:
Apparently, the avocado should be extinct! I guess it didn’t
get the memo. The creature that ate avocados (presumably whole) and then deposited them around the landscape is extinct, though. (gomphothere — elephant-like creatures that lived during the Miocene and Pliocene, between 12 million and 1.6 million years ago)
The bottom line (no pun intended) for avocado propagation is to
make it think it’s in a pile of poop, making sure it’s in a sunny spot where
you want a tree, and then just leave it alone. In New England? Well, sorry.
Just get your avocates at el Mercado.
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