Here at ECHO North America Impact Center, as the weather cools down we start ramping up our grafting! Last week, we received over 800 Lula avocados and distributed them to staff and friends to help us process the fruits to retrieve the seeds. We have already received back 217 of those seeds and seeded up 153 of those! The process of seeding up an avocado seed is easy and quick.
Once the seeds have been rinsed off we fill a 1 gallon pot with soil and create a small hole in the center at the top. Here is where the avocado seed is placed, but not buried! It is important that the pointy side of the seed is up and the rounder part is in the soil. Easy to remember: the seed points toward the sun! We lightly packed the soil around the seed and then thoroughly watered them. We don’t need to add any fertilizer as the seed comes packed and ready with its own nutrient-dense meal.
These seeds will hang out in our shade house where they’ll get a good amount of sun and consistent watering. Once they have sprouted and grown to a good grafting height we will do microcleft grafts on the Lula avocado rootstock using a variety of different scions!
Check out this ECHO video on the grafting process for Avocado to see the future of these seeds. Avocado Grafting Time Lapse | ECHOcommunity.org