CALIFORNIA AVOCADO ASSOCIATION 



69 



Fruiting Habits and Productiveness 



A comparison of the fruiting habits and productiveness of the different 

 races brings out some interesting points of difference, some of which are 

 of considerable importance from the standpoint of the avocado grower. 



In productiveness, it seems to me that the races rank in approximately 

 the following order: Mexican, Guatemalan, West Indian, and Chinini. 

 In other words, the Mexican is the most productive of all races, the Guate- 

 malan coming next, followed by the West Indian, and lastly the Chinini, 

 which falls much below the others in this respect. The Mexiccui I would 

 place at the top of the list because of its ability to produce heavy crops, 

 combined with its regularity in fruiting. The Guatemalan in many in- 

 stances produces as heavy crops as the Mexican, but as a race it shows a 

 decided tendency toward irregularity in fruiting, there being many more 

 "off'* years than in the Mexican. The West Indian in some instances 

 produces heavy crops, — the Trapp of Florida is a notable example, — 

 but as a race it is decidedly less productive than the Guatemalan. The 

 Chinini is markedly unproductive; occasionally a tree will be found which 

 bears heavily, but it is safe to say that 90% of the seedlings growing in 

 southern Mexico and Guatemala are shy bearers. 



It is worthy of note that old trees of all these races, here in the 

 Tropics, seem to be as productive as younger ones. I have seen huge 

 trees of the Mexican race, which must have been nearly a hundred years 

 old, bearing excellent crops. It seems to me we are justified in expecting 

 the avocados we are planting in California to remain in profitable produc- 

 tion much longer than citrus, trees ordinarily do. At the same time, it is 

 probable that trees grown under the constant stimulus of intensive cultiva- 

 tion and fertilization will exhaust themselves more rapidly than those grown 

 under the more normal condition which obtain here in the Tropics. I use 

 the word normal in the sense that the conditions found here more nearly 

 approximate those under which the avocado has been accustomed to exist 

 in the wild state. These conditions, it seems to me, should tend to prolong 

 the life of the tree because there is no stimulus to excessive fruit production. 

 When we plant avocados in California our object is to get as much fruit 

 as possible out of them every year ; the number of years which the tree may 

 stand up under such treatment is a matter of secondary importance. 



My studies in the Canyada at Queretaro left me impressed with the 

 uniform manner in which seedlings of the Mexican race perform. In the 

 lower part of this valley practically every tree was fruiting well, yet they 

 are all seedlings, hence each one a distinct variety and consequently subject 

 to varietal differences in fruiting habit as well as other characters. I do 

 not believe you can duplicate this in any of the principal avocado regions 

 of Guatemala. It will nearly always be found, when trees of the Guate- 

 malan race are under consideration, that many of them do not bear regu- 

 larly. They have a pronounced tendency to bear in alternate years. This 

 probably is not true of every variety, but it is true of the race as a whole. 

 I have never examined a group of seedlings in Guatemala and found every 

 one of them in bearing. There are always some that are "descansando'* — 

 "resting,*' as they say in Guatemala; they produced the previous year, and 

 are now taking a year off preparatory to bearing another good crop. As 

 stated in my paper on Guatemalan avocados, we may be able to control 

 this habit to a certain extent by judicious cultural treatment, so that the 



