Our Avocado Trees

Mike and Judy Henderson

Boyle asked me for some pictures of our avocado trees - so here they are.

This is the tree in the front of our property.  The trees in front of the main house are Fuerte, while the trees behind the house are Hass.  The building you see behind the tree is our guest house, a 1200 square foot, two bedroom structure.

Next are the three trees along side the driveway - also Fuerte.

Between the guest house and the main house are four more Fuerte trees.  It's hard to see all the trunks in this picture.  That's a total of eight Fuerte trees.  The Fuertes produce their fruit early in the year, maybe March or April.  The Hass come in later - we're just starting to pick the Hass now (June/July).

Going to the back of the main house, we have a peach tree which is producing now.  It has just an enormous number of peaches on it and they all seem to ripen at about the same time - so we're giving peaches away to our friends.

We also have a small orange tree which does well.  We occasionally pick oranges and squeeze them for juice in the morning.

There are a total of five Hass trees in the back yard.  Here you can see maybe four.

And this will show the fifth, which shades our deck.

Avocado trees drop a lot of "stuff".  Early in the year, they drop their old leaves as the new leaves come out.  Then they flower.  After the flowers do their thing, they drop the remnants  of the flowers.  Next, they drop some of the twigs that the flowers were attached to, plus some of the small fruit that just doesn't hang on.  But later in the year, they reward us with the wonderful fruit.  Avocados don't ripen until after you pick them so we can pick a small number and leave the rest on the tree.  It isn't until very late in the season that the old fruit will start falling off the tree.  This, plus the difference in when the Fuerte and the Hass produce, allow us to have avocados almost all year long.