Avocados are one of my favorite fruits, they are perfect to combine with soft-boiled eggs on toast, or to put in a salad. Just add a little pepper and salt, and you're good to go. Usually, I throw these seeds away, like any other person, until I visited my friend's house and saw an army of avocado plants. They looked so cool, that I had to try this out for myself. And guess what, it's super easy!
Follow these easy steps to grow your own avocado plant from seeds
In a little over 10 steps, you will learn how to grow your own avocado plant. But be alarmed, it can be pretty addictive once you have started.
- Wash and dry your avocado pit for a few days
- After drying, peel the skin of the pit
- Spray the pit with a bit of water
- Take a paper towel, spray it with water
- Wrap the pit in the wet paper towel
- Get an air-tight bag and put the towel+pit in it
- Put it in a dark, dry, and warm place in your house
- Let it sit for about 2 weeks, and check if it is starting to sprout
- When the pit is starting to sprout, place it on the top of a narrow bowl/bottle. The pit mustn't be touching the water
- After a few days, you'll start seeing roots growing from the pit
- Once it reaches the bottom, it is ready to move to a slightly larger bowl/bottle (check for ones with a narrow neck)
- The avocado plant will start to grow more and more leaves over time
- Enjoy!
Things I wish I knew before growing my first avocado plant
The first time when I tried to grow my first avocado plant, it didn't work at all. I had no patience and was struggling to even let it sprout. I followed a tutorial online where you had to stab the seed with three sticks and place it above water. This didn't work at all for me, so I thought why not do it the classical way, and treat the seed like a normal seed?
This usually means that we first clean the seed, dry it, and then peel it and moisturize it for a few weeks until it is starting to sprout. That's what I did with chili peppers a few Summers ago. While I didn't get much further than young saplings with the chili peppers, it did work like a charm!
Placing sticks into the seed for sure will damage the seed, not that it matters a lot, it will show some dents in the seed as it starts to grow. After years they probably will be gone, but either way, I'd like to keep it visually appealing as well (I mean, check out dry and black one of the seeds below turned out). The blackness in the seeds will show after a while, this means that its flesh is damaged. Which is a sad story in my opinion. So that's kind of the trick, gently pulling the dried skin, so you get access to that fragile oily newer skin of the seed.
Using a wet paper towel inside an airtight bag also speeds up the process of sprouting. It's a simple, yet genius method to quickly sprout your seeds. Below you see a seed I kind of neglected a bit, but I certainly will give it a try to let it grow. You can already see it starting to grow, even though it may look a bit of a "disaster" right now. You'd be surprised how the roots are starting to form.
And while we were growing seeds at home, we noticed that there are differences in avocado seeds, who would've thought about that? So it's kind of a surprise every time you grow your avocado seed (unless you purchase them from the same store every single time, for obvious reasons).
That being said, the other avocado plant isn't doing that well, so I guess it might have something to do with adaptive weather conditions. This means that one of your seeds may not do well, so never give up and just start with another seed :).
Check out its shoots. Don't you ever wonder? It sure does make me proud to be able to pull this off :D. I mean, I'm not much of a green thumb, but never too old to learn right?
This is how you grow your first avocado plant
Easy, right? Do bear in mind that these plants won't bear any fruit. Even though it will take a lot of years to grow them into trees, unfortunately, this is how mother nature works. Nonetheless, it will give you a cool-looking (FREE) plant for in your home with a sick-looking root system!
Cheers,
Ruben
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Hey Ruben, check you out, this is great.
I know people who have grown avocado trees from the seed/stone. It took 7 years until they got any fruit. They grew it in a pot for the first year then put it in the ground on their land, I ate avocados from those two trees whilst I was living on the land.
Love the photos you have shared and the tutorial. I hope you are keeping well my friend xxxxx
Thank you!! I had no idea the trees could bear fruits (on the internet they said it won't bear any fruit), do you know if these trees are grown from biological seeds? That might be "it", right? Well, there might be some hope for @livinguktaiwan after all (it seems you can grow avocado fruit (after 7 years))!
Thank you for hopping by @trucklife-family, you're the master of home gardening!
Woah. This one is really informative and will be useful for me. My family loves eating avocado, and we usually throw out its seeds on the trash can. Now, I can finally follow the procedure you shared above. Thank you, and I will surely let you know if growing the seeds worked on me.
Glad you found it so useful! If you want, (and you're planning to blog about your progress) you can tag me in your post to keep me updated, or you can reply here in this thread if you'd like to. I'm curious what type of leaves you will grow! We have two, one darker green, and one lighter green (I think this one loves more Sun, as we don't have much here in the Netherlands).
Woow! This is really cool. I like avocados and I definitely will try this. I hope it will grow well if I transplant it into my garden outside the house. We also have an avocado tree in one of our gardens. I really don't know when it was planted but it's a very big tree now. I love to climb the tree. I usually climb the tree whenever we need to pluck the avocado fruit
It is really cool right!? Let me know how you're doing once you start growing! I keep them on water, because that's how they can survive as well, but putting them in a garden could become "fruitful" :P. Damn, you have your own avocado tree? I'm jealous! :D
No problem bro. I will keep you posted once my plant starts growing. Thanks
Love your avocado plants. I might try to grow it in spring as it is still cold here. May I ask how you take care of it now? Like how many time you change water per week and does it like sunny window?
Nice! The weather here in the Netherlands isn't much better :P (well, right now it is quite hot, but when I started it was pretty cold). From what I read, is that Avocado plants like "a lot of indirect Sunlight", I once placed one in direct Sunlight, and the leaves started to brown, which meant it was in direct Sunlight for too long.
Right now, I just have the plant as it is shown in the first image (in a big bottle of water, that I refresh every now and then, and re-fill it so the root canal is getting enough water, as long as it doesn't hit the seed itself). You can keep it on water, but you can also decide to pot it with some earth (I have no experience with that, so I don't know (but maybe @trucklife-family knows)).
oh that's good to know. I don't have a garden so growing it like the way you do is perfect. Btw love the bottle you use, I will try to find a similar one as it looks so cool.
Oh yeah, same here! No garden unfortunate, so this plant is -easy- to maintain. We bought this vase/bottle @ the Action in the Netherlands (not sure if they have it where you are located), which was pretttttyy cheap :D.
So you made us read all this and then tell us it won't bear any fruit!!!
Ok, I went back to the beginning of your post again, and the first image of your plant sitting on the top of the bottle is really unusual and cool, It would look great at home. You're forgiven 😂
Thanks for sharing!
Haha, I was also very sad when I read this... buttt @trucklife-family is mentioning she saw people grow trees that DID bear fruit! Hooray, another challenge added :P. That's cool. Grow one yourself, it's a free plant that just needs a bottle, water and some love. You can pet the leaves for doing a good job 😆
Do you know how long it takes? I wanted to plant an avocado in our ranch, but heard it just takes for ever =/ wondering if it will bear any fruits during my lifetime \o\
I thought it wouldn't bear any fruit, but @trucklife-family says she did saw people who grow avocado fruit from their 7-year old trees. I do think it has something to do with the nature of the seeds that you're growing. I bet that biological, specific avocado seeds, or seeds from store-bought avocado's do make a difference. This is probably why you want to grow and plant more than one seed from the start, so you have a higher success rate. I'd do it for sure if I had a ranch myself!
Seven years sound pretty good, it's not like waiting for a lifetime \o
I'm gonna try to plant some seeds to see what happens
Nice! How cool would it be if you are still blogging on Hive in 7 years and post about harvesting avocado's from that tree!
Hello @rubencress. I've never thought of growing avocado at home, but seeing your post now, I may give it a try some day. Nice tutorial by the way.
However, I'd like to remind you of communities again. For this type of topic (gardening), we have a few communities, where you can post. Like HiveGarden or ecoTrain for example.
OCD is for topics that don't fit in any other community and should be used when you don't find a niche community for your post.
Here's a guide I put together to help you learn about how communities work and why you should use them -> Communities Explained - Newbie Guide.
Once you posted your post in the right community, you can then cross post it to OCD community. Here's a guide about cross posting.
Please don't delete any post with the purpose of reposting it in another community as that can be considered abuse! Leave this post here, you'll get it right next time
You really should try it out, it's easy 😄.
Good point, thanks for poking me, otherwise I probably would've kept posting in OCD. I'm not a member of many communities tho, so I probably will post without the OCD tag in the future :)
You should have a look at communities and join a few. As I see you're posting about different topics, I'm sure you can find a few you like :)
I was skimming through your timeline (and noticed the updated bio of OCD as well), and there are some I might join. For example, my monthly reports, where would you publish them if they were yours? :D
I'm glad to hear you see a couple of communities you could join. There's a description for every community, rules too, to help you decide :)
I was able to find two of your monthly blogs, to be able to see what it is about. I suppose you write about what's happened during the month, possibly various topics, right? If you can't find a suitable community for that, than OCD is fine.
very nice plant, for me this is very unique to look at
Thank you @zawiel :)
Thanks Back Sir
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