Gadenin日本語Get the appHow the avocado year is shaped
The rhythm is unlike most fruit trees in two ways. Flowering is enormously prolonged, running over several weeks with more than a million flowers on a mature tree and a fruit set of a fraction of one per cent. And harvest is not a date but a window: mature fruit stays hard on the tree and can be picked over months, so the end of one season often overlaps the flowering of the next.
In many gardens a tree will be carrying fruit from last season while flowering for the next, and that overlap is normal. It also explains alternate bearing: a heavy crop hanging late competes with flowering and gives a light year afterwards. Picking a heavy crop off promptly is the practical response.
Season names below assume a warm-temperate or subtropical garden and translate directly to either hemisphere. Watch the tree and the thermometer rather than the calendar; the sequence of events is fixed even when the timing moves by a month.
| Season | The tree is doing | You should be doing |
|---|---|---|
| Late winter to early spring | Flower buds swelling; growth still slow | Check drainage and mulch depth; refresh whitewash on exposed bark; do not feed yet |
| Spring | Main flowering and fruit set; first growth flush | Keep water steady; no insecticide; prune once frost risk has gone; first light feed |
| Early summer | Heavy fruitlet drop; fruit sizing begins | Do not panic at the drop; water deeply as heat arrives; watch for mites |
| Summer | Fruit sizing; second growth flush; oil accumulating | Deep infrequent watering; leach the root zone; second feed; shade or whitewash new bark |
| Autumn | Fruit reaching maturity, still hard | Begin test pickings; stop feeding; reduce watering as growth slows |
| Winter | Dormant-ish; fruit holding on the tree | Pick as needed; frost protection; minimal water; no pruning |
Spring: flowering and the decisions that matter
This is the busiest and most consequential part of the year. Water is the priority: the tree must not go through flowering and fruit set with a dry root zone, and the drop caused by water stress at this moment cannot be recovered later. Keep the soil evenly moist through the flowering weeks without ever letting it become waterlogged.
Prune once the last frost has passed, taking height and opening the center, and whitewash whatever bark you expose the same day. Give the first small feed as growth begins, keeping nitrogen modest so the tree does not put its energy into shoots at the expense of fruit set.
Leave the pollinators alone. No insecticide of any kind while the tree is in flower, and no dust-raising work under the canopy on warm mornings when the bees are working. If flowering weather is cold, expect a light year and do not compensate by feeding harder.
Summer: hold the fruit, keep the roots cool
Everything in summer is about water and shade. Increase the volume of each watering as heat builds rather than the frequency, so the whole root zone is wetted and then allowed to breathe. Top the mulch back up to four to six inches (10-15 cm), keeping it clear of the trunk, because bare hot soil over shallow roots is the fastest way to stress the tree.
Leach the root zone at least once in high summer with a soak of roughly double the usual volume, which flushes accumulated fertilizer and irrigation salts down past the roots. Container trees need this every few weeks.
Watch the leaf undersides for mites during any long hot dry spell and hose the canopy if bronzing starts. Check that no limb has been left newly exposed by summer growth movement or a broken branch, and whitewash it if it has.
Fruitlets yellowing and dropping through early summer is the tree thinning its own crop, not a problem to solve. Judge the season by what is still hanging at the end of the drop.
Autumn and winter: testing, picking and protecting
Start test pickings in autumn: take two or three of the largest fruit, leave them at room temperature, and see whether they soften evenly within ten days. Repeat every three or four weeks until they do. Once the answer is yes you can pick at your own pace over the following weeks or months, since the tree stores the crop better than you can.
Stop feeding well before cold weather so the tree is not carrying soft growth into frost, and cut watering back sharply as growth slows. Winter overwatering in cool soil is the classic route into root rot, particularly for trees in containers.
Young trees need frost protection and mature ones usually do not. A tree under three years old can be wrapped, covered on cold nights, or given a temporary frame; established trees tolerate a light frost with damage limited to the outer leaves. Container trees move under cover before the first hard frost and want a bright, cool, dry position rather than a warm room.
The record that makes next year easier
Keep a short log with a handful of fixed entries each year: the date flowering started and the weather during it, the date of each test picking and whether the fruit ripened well, the dates harvest started and finished, roughly how many fruit you took, and each feed with its date and rate. That is perhaps ten lines a year.
Two or three seasons of that is worth more than any general guidance, because it tells you your own tree's flowering week, your own maturity date, and your own alternate-bearing pattern. It also stops the recurring arguments with yourself: when the leaf tips brown again you can look up whether you were overfeeding last time, and when a light crop arrives you can see from the record that it followed a heavy one and is exactly what should have happened.