the saga of an unfortunate avocado

Avocados are a tasty treat back in Manila, where we have a tree planted in our backyard, just a foot away from our outdoor dirty kitchen. Where you can cook stuff with a kawa—an Asian wok—as huge as this:

this is a Pinoy kawa--an Asian wok--where we cook
stuff for big country-style shindigs like wedding banquets
and memorials for the dead

All we do is look up the tree, check if there’s some nice ripe fruit to be had, pick the nice shiny ones, and halve them for eating.

You have a choice of eating the flesh straight off the fruit with or without sugar, or you can scoop out the flesh, place it in a bowl, drench the whole shebang in evaporated milk and sugar and after a stint in the fridge, serve it as desert.

Nothing beats the yummy of an avocado fresh off the tree...which was the thought running through my mind when I was prepping the avocado that we bought at a local Mexican grocery store here in Orange City.

Once the idea struck, it stuck. So I fired up good ol’ Google and searched how to grow avocado from seed.

What I saw was simple enough: stick three toothpicks into the hapless seed, suspend it on top of a cup of water ‘til it roots, and transfer the sprout onto a container.

can't believe this excited me to no end when i first saw it.

Yep, after a long long looooooooooong wait, I got my pretty little plantlet peeking out...and transplanted it onto a container after the requisite 6-week wait.

That was in the autumn whence I placed my little avocado sapling out on the back porch to soak up some sun. Winter 2011 in Florida was warmish so there wasn’t any need to shield my avocado plantlet from the cold weather.

Spring came, and along with it the infamous frost of February 2012 where temperatures reached a low of 27ish in our city. And foolish me, I forgot to bring in my poor little hapless avocado sapling.

frost-bitten dying avocado leaves *sniff, sniff*

Yes, those leaves are the victims of a vicious frost. Terrified that the dead leaves will kill off the whole plant, I sheared ‘em off and nursed my little avocado back to health.

my pretty little avocado plant was reduced to this
poor little leafless sapling because its Mum forgot
there was a nasty frost warning for the night.

It took awhile but after a few weeks, I saw li’l brave leaves jutting out of the nodes.

leaves of hope heh

Today, I went out and fertilized my little avocado plant to give it a little boost:

my resurrected avocado, a little worse for wear but alive!

Right now, I’m deciding where to best plant the avocado in our somewhat humongous but barren yard. It has to be near enough to pick when the time comes but far enough not to be in the way.

Let me think...