This week I’m marking trees for top-working to another variety.   This block has about 1900 Gem trees and no pollenizers.  Pollenizers are varieties we use as pollen donors to our  trees that grow fruit.  The ratio of production trees and pollenizer density is the subject of a lot of debate.  This is why people will tell you “you need two avocados trees”.  While you don’t NEED them…in many locations having pollenizers is critical to getting a good fruit set. 

At the time we planted this block there was almost no research on Gems & pollenizers.  Production numbers have been lower than we expect and so we are going back through to graft these other varieties into the block.   Using older research on hass for the best planting configuration, we are making our best educated guess.  It will be 3-4 years before we know if we made the right decision or not.

Grafting update:  trees are marked, pruned & whitewashed to protect them from sunburn.  Next up is actually doing the graft.  Then we wait 3-4 years and hope we were right. 🤞

🥑🍋 Farmer / LAMP stack dev / Husband / 🌈 Dad / Web1 dude loving a web3 world / Collector of things digital & physical / 
CdeP ‘94 

We do it for two reasons:

The leaves protect the trunk & branches from overheating.  When you take 90% of the leaves off the tree would likely die without some artificial sun protection. 

The second reason is to suppress new growth from those branches.  Direct sunlight stimulates new branches.  Since we are grafting a new variety of avocado on top of the old we don’t want new branches of the old type.

After the graft these trees will have 4 unique sets of genetic material on different parts of the tree:  original seed, clonal root stock, clonal initial graft (Gem), clonal pollenizer graft. We can “undo” the graft by simply pruning it off and exposing original clonal stock.   And it’s a totally natural process!

That's a bit more involved than I thought.
I'd rather have it done this way than by direct gene manipulation or whatever