Planting an Avocado Pit? Expect a 7-to-10-Year Wait for Fruit

Can you grow an avocado tree from the pit left over from your guacamole? Absolutely. The catch is time: it will probably be seven to ten years before that tree gives you any fruit at all. And when it finally does, there is no guarantee the avocados will be anything like the one you started with.

Why does a seedling take so long?

A tree grown from seed has to grow up before it flowers. It spends its early years putting on roots, trunk and canopy, and only once it has reached a certain maturity does it start to bloom and set fruit. Seven to ten years is a realistic expectation, and some seedlings take longer. Avocado Production in California: A Cultural Handbook for Growers, Book One puts it at up to ten years to bear fruit, says some seedling trees never bear at all, and notes that most ungrafted seedlings may not even flower for ten to fifteen years after planting.

Compare that with a grafted nursery tree. Most grafted trees begin to bear in their third year after planting, and a grove reaches full production somewhere around years eight to ten. We look at how that crop builds in how long until an avocado tree produces fruit. That head start is one of the main reasons every commercial avocado tree is grafted.

Read nextAlternate Bearing as Survival: Why a Fuerte Tree Floods the Forest With Fruit

Will it be the same avocado?

Probably not. Avocados do not grow true to seed. Every pit is the product of pollination, so the tree that grows from it is genetically its own thing, the way a child is not a copy of either parent. A seed from a Hass will not give you a Hass tree. The fruit could be good, ordinary, or quite different in size, skin and flavor.

In effect, every seedling is a brand new variety, and the odds are not in its favor: the handbook is blunt that the vast majority turn out worse than the varieties we already have. Once in a while one is a winner. Hass itself began as a chance seedling that Rudolph Hass bought from a nursery in 1926 and planted in his grove in La Habra Heights. He kept it only because grafts of Fuerte would not take on it, and it turned out to be exceptional. Every Hass since is a graft from that one tree, a story we told in Hass avocado Patent 139.

That is exactly why named varieties like Hass, Fuerte and Reed are propagated by grafting: it is the only way to get the same fruit reliably. If you are curious how much those named varieties differ, our guide to avocado varieties is a good place to start.

The volunteer under our tree

We have a perfect example in the grove: an avocado that dropped, sprouted and started growing on its own under one of our trees. You know its mother but not its father, and not what its fruit will be like. If we dug it up and transplanted it, it would likely be 10 years or more before it fruited, and the fruit would not match the tree it fell from.

If you find one under your own tree and want to grow it on, give it its own spot. Left under an established tree, it competes for the same water and nutrients in the same shallow soil: most of an avocado’s feeder roots sit in the top 8 to 10 inches, according to Avocado Production in California: A Cultural Handbook for Growers, Book Two.

That is why we plant grafted trees. We pick the rootstock first, based on where a tree will go: some handle root rot better, others handle salty water better, and none is immune to root rot. Then we pick the variety on top: Hass, Fuerte, Zutano, Gwen, GEM and so on. The grafted trees we buy arrive at a decent size, and the older the tree, the more it costs. Once planted, ours typically give us fruit to harvest in three to five years.

What about the roots?

Grafting fixes the top of the tree, but the roots matter too. A grafted tree sits on a rootstock, and for decades most California avocados were grafted onto seedling rootstocks. The catch is the same one you get with a pit: seedlings from a root-rot-tolerant parent usually do not carry the same tolerance; Book Two puts the heritability of root rot resistance at less than 1 percent. That is why nurseries now clone rootstocks as well, and why a clonal tree costs roughly twice as much as one on a seedling rootstock. We explain the choices in what an avocado rootstock is.

If you already have a healthy seedling, grafting it with budwood from a named variety is how growers turn an unknown tree into a known one. We answered that question for a reader in can a seed-grown avocado tree fruit.

So is it worth doing?

If you enjoy the process, yes. Sprouting a pit is a fun project, especially with kids, and a seedling makes a handsome tree. Just go in knowing it is an experiment, not a shortcut to avocados. Plan for the space, too: an unpruned avocado can get very big, as we explain in how tall avocado trees grow.

And if you would rather not wait a decade, our 4lb and 6lb Hass boxes ship free in season — the waitlist on either page covers the months between harvests. Until the trees are picking again, the avocado scoop, the Hawaiian shirt and our hats ship year-round.

This post is part of our guide to growing avocado trees.