Taro & Ti Avocado

For a few weeks, this first varietal avocado of mine sat, with little growth at all. Then, it started shedding leaves. Yet, I noticed that the flower stalks were elongating a bit. Was it going to expend all its energy on the flowers while shedding its leaves and ultimately cratering completely?

Fortunately, I had little to worry about. While avocados are famous for losing leaves when moved, in this case it was losing leaves because, well - it was that time of the year and it was both flowering and pushing out replacement leaf buds. I removed carefully many of the flowers, hoping to reduce energy drainage on flowers that may not even bear fruit anyway. I’m not sure if helped any, but while it still drops a leaf or two, I noticed new leaves coming out of this indeterminate avocado.

They started off small but yesterday I saw that some of them had become most distinctly… leaves. Oh, they still need to get a bit larger, but they’re new leaves. And quite a few more are on the way. I had held off potting this Wurtz avocado up pending it’s settling in enough to produce leaves. As soon as these young leaves mature a bit and more start coming in, this avocado is going to find a 25 gallon container home that will let it stretch its roots out some. I’ll also inoculate its roots with mycorrhizal fungus to give it a bit of a kick and mix in some rock phosphate in the compost-based media that it will be planted in.

It flowered this year. If it has most of the year to get established in a large container, it may flower again next year. Perhaps I may even get a fruit or three from it. We shall see…

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 10:19 am and is filed under Babble Column . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.