Eat The Yard

Who would have guessed that seed-grown is not the way to go when it comes to most fruits, including avocado?  Apparently, even a plant can be untruthful.

A little more than two years ago my mom passed on to me a little potted avocado tree, about a foot tall.  A neighbor with excellent gardens and flush avocado trees had given it to her.  It had been grown from seed.  Knowing my preoccupation with plants (because she’s my mom), she re-gifted it to me, and I was able to coax a few feet of growth out of it that summer.  These days it stands a bushy six feet tall.  This past season it sprouted flowers for the first time, but to our disappointment it produced no fruit.  Not one.

I dismissed it as a first-year-flowering thing and moved on.  But in talking with my mother-in-law, Kat, a landscape designer and all-around plant know it all, she expressed concern that the tree might not ever bear.  Chatting at Evergreen Nursery, where she works, we double-checked with the manager, who said the same: It wouldn’t produce because it was from seed.  I needed to get a grafted tree from a nursery.  I had heard this before when shopping apple trees, and, frankly, I was skeptical.  It sounded like something growers and sellers pitched to keep customers on the leash.

It sounded like a dodge.  Trees have grown from seed and successfully reproduced through fruiting for millions of years.  Come on.  My tree grown from seed won’t produce fruit?  Now that it’s commercial, it’s suddenly an evolutionary dead end?  Without grafting, this species is done?  Thank natural selection for humans and their grafting skills because avocados are damn good.

I dug in and researched the shit out of this question.  Irresponsibly, too, because I wasn’t looking for an honest answer but the capitalist conspiracy I’d invented.  But it wasn’t out there.  Not really.

My avocado tree will bear fruit, but not for four to seven years — or longer (trees are patient creatures).  And the avocados it does produce are unlikely to be true, meaning they won’t taste like or be of the same quality as the parent avocado.  That’s the lie.  It’s not guaranteed that the avocados of seed-grown trees will be inedible.  There’s a chance that in their individuality these natural trees might produce some great flavor that we’ve never tasted before.  I mean, all the avocado types we preserve and pass on through grafting originated somewhere, a flavor personality created in a fashion not unlike our own species’ individuality.

Avocados deal in simple dominance, genetically speaking, just as we do.  Their chromosomes have dominant and recessive alleles, and the dominant ones win out every time and are expressed.  The traits come and crash together during sexual reproduction, but rather than a brown-eyed girl, you get a pebbly little avocado with a seed that contains its own flavor profile, its own chance to attract giant (extinct) mammals with guts big enough to pass the seeds once the tasty fruit is consumed.

I wrote this post with the intent of giving away my natural avocado as an ornamental to the first taker on Craigslist.  We have already picked up a grafted, reliable Hass and Fuerte.  No surprises.  But that’s not really sporting.  The Hass cultivar originated in the yard of a California mail carrier named Rudolph Hass in 1935, and now it’s a celebrated type with billions of fans around the world.  Who’s to say that this tree from my old neighborhood, given to me by my mom, doesn’t have the same chance?

This is America, damn it.  This tree could be president.  If it wanted.

Tags: avocados