#avocado tree

here's something nobody tells you before you plant an avocado tree:

most of them never produce a single piece of fruit. not because avocados are difficult, but because there are three things that go wrong almost every time - wrong variety for your climate, drainage that isn't good enough, and a total misunderstanding of how avocado pollination actually works.

(the pollination thing especially. avocados have what's called a Type A and Type B flowering system, and if you don't know about this going in, you can do everything else right and still end up with a beautiful tree that just... sits there.)

i've just published a full beginner's guide to growing avocados at home - covering variety selection, planting, drainage setup, pollination, and how to protect your tree from Phytophthora root rot, which is the thing that quietly kills more avocado trees than anything else and usually isn't noticed until it's too late.

An Excerpt from Chapter 46 Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous Dad was due to arrive at any moment from the airport. I stood beneath the thin shade of a withered avocado tree, watching the dirt road beyond the dying grove. Heat pressed down through the dry California air. Dust clung to my sneakers. The leaves above me barely stirred. It was hard to believe three years had…

This little Avocado sapling wasnt supposed to be there. In this one large repurposed bucket, there are two Avocado saplings but I only planted one.

The little one was originally in the smaller water bottles and was accidently destroyed. I thought there was no chance for it to survive and then pulled it out to make room for a new sapling.

When I did pull it out there were small roots, and the seed broke in two. So I planted the broken seeds in the soil so that the nutrition could go into the soil.

I didn't expect for it to grow still. So yeah, the little one lived. A happy little surprise.

Our lemon tree was planted a long time ago in a bad spot; there were other trees around it that got increasingly too tall for it to get as much sun as it needs. This year it died down to the point were the only green on it was from suckers, so we decided to take it down and try again in a sunnier spot of our yard. The stump is still putting out suckers. I cut the fresh growth back again today. I'm going to hang the stems up to dry out, so that I'll have new growth lemon leaves for spell work later. I'm loving how bright green the foliage gets.

We're also taking two of the cuttings to see if we can get one to take root. One in a pot with soil, and one in water. If either of them take well enough, we'll try planting it in the back yard where there's some actual sunlight during most of the day.