Monster Fuerte at the Top of the Tree: Pole-Picking the Biggest Avocados

Like a lot of fruit trees, avocados love to put their fruit at the very top, where the sun is. On our Fuerte trees that often means the biggest avocados of all are hanging well out of reach. So how do we get up there? Not by climbing. We use a pole picker.

How does a pole picker work?

It is a simple, clever tool. At the top of a long pole there is a small basket with a cutting blade and a bag hanging beneath it, and a rope runs down the pole to your hands.

• Raise the pole up into the tree and bring the basket up under the avocado.
• Guide it so the stem slides into the notch by the blade.
• Pull the rope. The blade cuts the stem.
• The avocado drops into the bag instead of onto the ground.

Then you lower the pole, take the fruit out and go looking for the next one. We have written up the Hass version of this job in how we pick avocados from the top of the tree, and keeping an old tool in working order in repairing a vintage pole picker.

Why not just let them fall?

A Fuerte dropping from the top of a tall tree is a bruised Fuerte, and its thin skin makes it more fragile than a Hass. On top of that, fruit that hits the ground cannot be sold — we explain the food-safety rules in why ground-dropped fruit can’t be sold. Cutting the stem and catching the fruit in the bag keeps it clean and undamaged.

The ones at the top are the monsters

In the video Kirk spots a couple of Fuerte right at the top of the tree, squints into the sun, and brings down one monster after another. That is typical. Avocado flower clusters form on the outer, sunlit parts of the canopy, so that is where the fruit sets, and the fruit up high gets the most light and room, and it tends to be some of the largest on the tree. In big, crowded trees the pull toward the top is even stronger: the UC handbook notes that shaded lower leaves drop and are not replaced, and the tree shifts its growth, and with it the flowering and fruit, to the upper canopy where the light is. Leaving that fruit up there would mean leaving the best behind.

It is also why pole picking takes patience. You are working at the far end of a long pole, looking up into the light, trying to seat one stem in the cutter without knocking neighboring fruit loose. You get better at it, but it never becomes quick. It is also one reason growers try to keep trees lower: in a UC pruning trial described in the handbook, stumped Hass trees trained to a central leader and topped at 14 feet could be harvested entirely from the ground with picking poles.

Fuerte, the heritage avocado

Fuerte is the green, smooth-skinned variety that ran California before Hass (Hass only passed it in volume in 1972), and its season picks up as Hass finishes. More on that in Fuerte avocado season.

Our 4lb Fuerte box is picked this way, one stem at a time, and ships free. If Fuerte is between harvests when you read this, the waitlist on that page will let you know when it is back.

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