CULTURAL TIP: RE-THINKING YOUR HARVESTING STRATEGY
Flowering and fruit set appears to be well underway in many areas, so now is the time to take a critical look at your trees. Consider what may have happened over the last year to give the trees their current appearance.
If your trees have a good crop, good covering of healthy green leaves, and a good flowering with potential for a good fruit set, then you can be justifiably proud of a job well done. However, if the trees are looking like they have dropped all their old leaves, have a light crop of small fruit with relatively weak flowering, then there is room for improvement.
To figure out why your trees have a poor harvest this year, it is necessary to review your cultural management decisions, or more importantly lack of cultural management decisions, when the big crop harvested in 2010 was on the trees. The best place to start may be to evaluate your harvest strategy at the time. Did you hold fruit on the trees far longer than usual? If so, what you have to harvest this avocado season is most likely the trees reaction to the extra stress. Holding fruit on the tree, even for only a little extra time, when there is a big crop can be very damaging to the following year’s crop.
The really smart and savvy growers are those with good crops to harvest this season, despite the large crop last year. Very often these growers make decisions to harvest big crops early, sometimes resulting in taking a hit in the market with low prices. However, removing fruit from the trees will better allow them to be rewarded with a big crop when the prices are high the next season. The next time your trees have a big crop, be sure to analyze your harvest strategy, carefully weighing the short term benefits and long term consequences of hanging fruit on the trees longer than usual.
