Some avocado fruit, such as Mexicola, Topa Topa, and Rincon, have smooth skin. The odd one, such as Lula, has ‘almost’ smooth skin. Most other have skin with varying degrees of ‘roughness’. Botanically, the bumps on avocado skin are tubercles, as are the bumps on the skin of other fruit, such as lychee and gourds. …
Author Archives: Laurie Meadows
Sclerified avocado seed cotyledon surface encrustations
These sclerified areas on these avocado seed are unusual. Seeds of the genus Persea don’t usually have sclereids associated with the seed. Two other genera in the Lauraceae family (Endiandra and Beilschmeidia) do have an inner sclerified layer, but it is continuous, not scattered (Little et al, 2009). These hard longitudinal encrustations on the surface …
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Avocados ‘join the club’
The ‘traditional’ economic model for fruit production and sale has changed dramatically in recent decades, but the change has not registered in the public consciousness. Growers used to decide what variety of fruit tree to plant, according to their own ideas about the market trends, disease resistance, climatic adaption, and so on. Trees could be …
Seedling # 2
This fruit taste good (for the most part), but the tree is unproductive and the fruit has bitterness under the skin and intrusive fibers. The fruit illustrated above fell naturally from the tree on the 3rd of December 2019. It was ripe on the 8th. So roughly a week to ripen. This fruit is nearly …
Homologous, Orthologous or Paralogous?
Arabidopsis thaliana, not much more than a ‘steekin little weed’, has proved to be a towering giant in revealing gene structure, function and location in plants. Genes tend to be conserved over time, even as speciation takes place. It’s been shown to be reasonable to suppose that if a gene found in Arabidopsis does a …
Avocado Flower Mutations
Avocado flower ‘petals’ are comprised of 2 whorls, each of three similar-sized petal-like structures called tepals. No one can decide if avocado ‘petals’ are actually sepals or really sepal-like petals – thus the compromise name ‘tepal’. According to a University of California avocado expert, in some small-fruited species in the genus Persea the subtending tepal …
Global Warming & Avocado Breeding
Note: I am grateful to Chris Sayer, Californian avocado grower, for documenting climate effects on avocado cropping via Twitter. We are on track to retain more and more energy in our climate system Increasing carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels will increase the energy retained in our climate system by at least an additional …
Seedling # 1
One of the better ‘home garden advantage’ avocados. From time to time a home garden seedling will be superior to Hass in the early part of the Hass season. And that is the case here. Picked 18 September, it was ripe on the 25th. So roughly a week. This fruit is better than Hass at …
Author’s Motives
Whether we are consciously aware of it or not, I believe that we act in what we believe to be our own best interest, all the time. So it must be in my best interest to allocate time write on this subject. I am a ‘non-scientist’, retired, a home gardener on a ‘lifestyle block’, and …
Avocado Seedlings
Avocado seedlings can pop up almost anywhere in the garden. We had one grow near our incinerator, another came up in the compost heap, then there was the one by the deck, the seedling tree right outside the kitchen window. All these trees fruited (eventually). We named the fruiting seedlings ‘incinerator’, ‘compost’, ‘deck’ and ‘kitchen’ …
Avocado Gene Expression, Climate, and Society 