Flowers and fruit

We all know simple botany. Pollination, fertilisation, the tree "birds and bees" conversation is somehow far easier to have than the same one with humans. An avocado tree produces an enormous amount of flowers, as you can see in the video below. These are young trees, producing a flowering like this for the first time in their life. Typically, a tree will produce over 1 million flowers, but only have 200 to 300 pieces of fruit per tree. Whilst this sounds like a terrible "conversion rate", the truth is that this is normal. Germination to fertilisation takes 24 hours or less. Hass avocado, as this one below, is what is called a type-A flowering cultivar. In other words, the plant starts out in female "mode" and then switches to male "mode" after a 6 odd hour process. There is a good video on YouTube that shows a time lapse. What happens thereafter is what is called "fruit-set" and hopefully very little "fruit-drop", two processes which mean what their name implies. In other words, how the tree manages the process of making sure the small avocado "sticks" and matures into a full grown fruit. In avocado farming, this is a tense time for the farmer and by extension all of us, you can have magnificent flowering and a crop that does not meet your expectations. Some regions of the world also have two flowerings, and here below, you can see it perfectly. 8 odd months later, you are away and harvesting the proverbial fruits of your success. We will follow the process and continue to update you, Rob will mark this particular tree and we can follow the fruit process from small to harvest. Stay tuned.