Here's a bit of avocado biology: Avocado flowers are the only flowers with separate male and female phases!
Each flower opens first as a female and then the next day as a male. On top of this unusual feature, there are two types of avocado trees with different timing of the flowers: A-type trees open their female flowers in the morning and these flowers reopen as males in the afternoon. B-type trees open their female flowers in the afternoon and then their male flowers the following morning. Since fruiting requires cross-pollination, it helps to have both phases. (UCLA Agriculture avocado information)
My parents have three avocado trees in their backyard in Florida. One never bears any fruit. The other two are large trees that bear delicious harvests. Maybe the trees are different phases?
3 comments:
Great looking box of souvenirs-I'd have packed more! You can pick avocados full but not yet ripe and they naturally ripen over the course of a few days to a week-so we do this , picking a bunch at various stages of ripeness, whenever we visit someone with a bearing tree.
The only problem is both trees are at least 50 feet tall. Even with a long picking pole, we can't reach any of the fruit. We can only stand underneath and think about how good they will taste when they fall down. Every morning we check on what has fallen overnight and hope we will beat the squirrel to it.
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