Why Our Avocado Plant is Unlikely to Ever Yield Fruit
We’ve got a potted avocado plant. Will we get guacamole?
As a child, I remember carefully inserting toothpicks into the pit of an avocado so that we could balance it over the top of a glass of water, the liquid just tickling the bottom half of the large brown seed.
It always seemed so crazy that a bit of the food we ate (on the semi-rare occasions when we purchased avocados — those were expensive!) could just start growing, from nothing more than being left alone in a cup of water.
Strangely enough, I never remember what happened to all those sprouted avocados. Did we just throw them out? Did they die? Are they still sitting in pots, somewhere, waiting for me to eventually return to my childhood home and rediscover them?
The memories came up more recently, when my wife returned from a friend’s house bearing a new avocado seed — and sure enough, there were the three toothpicks, the glass of water, all just the same as when I was a child.
This time, we didn’t lose the avocado seed at some point. It sat on our kitchen counter for months, and we’d watch as roots extended down into the glass and a little leaf emerged to orient towards the afternoon sun streaming in through the window.
