DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Years ago we moved into a house. An enormous tree shaded the patio, but nobody knew what sort of tree it was. Then one day, ducking under a low-hanging branch, I knocked my head on an avocado hiding in the thick foliage. “Who put this avocado in my tree?” I wondered briefly. Then I saw: it was attached!

With practice, I developed the skill of spotting avocadoes on the tree. They’re quite well hidden actually, especially when the spotter is legally blind. I also created a picking tool — a plastic cup lashed to a 10' pole, low-tech but effective — to assist in harvesting fruit that would otherwise be out of reach.

That first year, we felt rich beyond any measure… fresh avocados weekly for months! It was our first taste of country living.

But that was three years ago. With every Spring we searched for the new crop, sometimes finding tiny squirrel-chewed avocado buds but little else. We tried watering the tree. We tried fertilizing. We postponed trimming in fear of shocking an apparently fragile specimen.

And then we gave up. We stopped the fertilizer, ignored the watering schedule, and hacked the low limbs off the tree so we don’t have to duck down to walk past. And today we craned our necks and found about 100 avocadoes on the tree, glowing in the sun and screaming to be made into guacamole.

There’s something miraculous about having food appear in one’s yard like this.

Avocado fans will be entertained by the California Avocado Commission website — FAQs, trivia, recipes, and the accidental gardener’s friend, the Avocado Variety Chart.