Its avocado year!
Yes after so many barren years, the avocados in the farm have fruited. FOUR trees in all, one of which or maybe more were Dads germinated in his famous broken buckets! He had those tin buckets which split at the bottom and instead of throwing them out, he filled them with compost and pushed Rose apple and Avocado seeds in them. The seeds germinated and remained in the bucket not growing beyond 3 feet height.
Then along came my farm and all his famous buckets were planted in the farm. Each tree has different leaves and differently shaped fruit. He even had a purple African variety which sadly I did not get. However I recognise the provenance of the four trees on my property.
The last of the avocados from one tree.
The first tree which fruited had round fruit. They were perfectly spherical and not very large. Those were the first fruit we harvested as we found some fallen off the tree, lying in the grass beneath. The
leaves of this tree are dark green and large and flappy.
The next tree had pear shaped small fruit like the Haas variety Andy buys in the US from COSTCO. These fruit I took to Goa and my Goa friends bought them and sang their praises for weeks after they ate them. They remained green when ripe and just got soft. It was so heartening that we took them out correctly in time for them to ripen. That is the biggest worry for a fruit farmer. Have you taken out the fruit immature? Then your harvest is wasted.
Arpans stash have ripened in a week.
A smaller tree got a rash of fruit but sadly most of them fell off when there was a storm. It was really sad that only five fruit hung on and grew to maturity. It was sad, but we realised a fruit farmer can never be sure of the harvest as the trees are open to the elements. Happened with our mango crop last year, but luckily we grow a lot of Mallika with thick stalks even though the fruit are large.
The fourth and last tree - Sunday harvest is a ritual.
The fourth and last tree was bent double with the weight of the fruit on it. I had got Sundar to chop a V branch from the Jamun tree and prop up the branches which were almost touching the ground with the weight of the fruit. However the fruit took much longer to mature. I carried home a apple and peach picker from the UK, a gift from a gardener on my group. JP brought the picker to David's house, and we picked apples off the neighbour's tree, which they don't mind.
The Goa gardeners were begging for the fruit, but before I could advertise all 4 kgs were gone. Infact I bought a new weighing scale as the older one had done its time. We have an Indian fruit picker off Amazon and this British picker which is also good. I like these simple tools which make harvesting easy and there's no need of extra labour like Dad had to employ.
This year has been a good year for both Lychees and avocados. Hopefully it remains for next year as well. Nothing like good harvests for us organic fruit farmers.
