These are the books on our shelf at the grove. Two of them are the grower handbooks we lean on most, and you can download both free right here. The others are books we think anyone who loves avocados, or wonders where their food comes from, will enjoy.
Jump to a book: Avocado Production in California, Book One · Book Two · Green Gold · Food Fight
Free grower handbooks
Avocado Production in California, Book One: Background Information
Why we love it: This is the book we reach for when a question starts with “why.” Why Hass flowers when it does, why rootstock matters, how to lay out a hillside grove, and how the California avocado industry got started. It was written by University of California farm advisors and growers who worked the same Southern California hills we do, and we cite it throughout our growing articles.
Inside: history of the California avocado industry; botany and commercial varieties; flowering and pollination; rootstocks; site selection, roads and erosion control; planting the tree.
© The Regents of the University of California. Shared free and unchanged under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license. Published by University of California Cooperative Extension, San Diego County, and the California Avocado Society, with support from the California Avocado Commission. Also available from UC Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Avocado Production in California, Book Two: Cultural Care
Why we love it: Book Two is the working manual. Irrigation, fertilizer, disease, root rot, pests, pruning and frost each get their own chapter, with numbers you can actually use. Our irrigation calculator and our tree-height article both lean on it, and it is the first thing we check before we change how we care for the trees.
Inside: irrigation; fertilization; disease; root rot control; insects and mites; vertebrate pests; pruning and canopy management; frost.
© The Regents of the University of California. Shared free and unchanged under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license. Published by University of California Cooperative Extension, San Diego County, and the California Avocado Society, with support from the California Avocado Commission. Also available from UC Agriculture and Natural Resources.
More books we love
Green Gold: The Avocado’s Remarkable Journey from Humble Superfood to Toast of a Nation
Why we love it: It tells the story of how the avocado went from a Latin American staple to the fruit on every brunch menu, through the trees and the growers in Mexico and California who made it happen. If you have ever wondered how a grove like ours came to exist, this is the backstory, and it reads like one.
Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World
Why we love it: Sexton looks at the policies, from biofuel mandates to opposition to GMOs, that he argues make food harder and costlier to grow. You don’t have to agree with every point to come away seeing farm economics more clearly, and it pairs well with our piece Why Is the American Farmer Disappearing?
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