Village Homes Realty
Our community avocado orchard is powering along!
I’m so impressed with the effort that some clusters/households are making, and their trees are starting to respond to the love. This will become more apparent as time goes by.
Community Avocado Orchard on Ecovillage Commons land – six trees from 2B. This is the ideal scenario, mulched from top to bottom and in between – great job!
Avo trees absolutely love eucalyptus mulch, the biology between the carbon and the soil, the temperature moderation, and the lack of competition from weeds that mulching provides. I can also see that this is all free tip mulch as well, which is just such a great use of a local recycled material.
The best fertiliser is a thin layer of manure – I prefer goat and cow (or composted/pelletised poultry), as being multi-stomach animals with amazing biological digestion of their foods, their poo is also full of beneficial bacteria, and higher in NPK and trace elements than most other manures. Believe it or not, of the two, goat has higher NPK and trace elements. It’s also easy to apply, but not so easy to come by!
It’s important to apply a thin layer of manure under your mulch to supply some of the nitrogen (N) required to break down the carbon in the mulch.
We recently handed over the Stage 3 and 4 avocado rows, starting off with a two hour talk and questions in our office, followed by an hour in the orchard.
We’d love everyone to stick to their own rows for a fair system. Fallen fruit is to be mulched, under your tree mulch – worms love them! This is standard practice in commercial orchards, but essential when we start using recycled waste water.
There is a bumper crop for each cluster this year! The fruit are large enough to ripen now, but they won’t taste anywhere near as good as they will from around early November through to April/May.
You can leave fruit on the tree to provide fruit almost all year round, however, if you do this you won’t get as big a crop next season. Therefore, as each home has been given three trees, I recommend leaving fruit on one tree each year, so you can get some avos between April to October, and harvest all of the fruit on your other two trees between November to March. Then rotate the ‘out of season providing tree’ each year. The more you harvest between November to January, the more fruit your trees will bear next season.
