Hass Avocado Season Wrap-Up: What to Expect as Fuerte Season Arrives

Our Hass harvest is finished for the year, and Fuerte season is next: the Fuertes on our trees are sizing up now and will be ready to pick in late fall and winter. As late summer gives way to early autumn in Southern California, walking the rows today you can see next year’s Hass crop, set during this spring’s bloom, already sizing on the branches, while our classic Fuerte avocados continue to swell and build their oil content. For growers and fruit enthusiasts alike, this seasonal transition highlights the natural cadence of a working family avocado grove.

The Overlap: Two Avocado Crops on One Tree

One of the most remarkable horticultural characteristics of the avocado tree is its long hang time: mature fruit can stay on the branch for months, so one season’s crop is often still on the tree when the next one sets. While our picking crews have harvested the last mature Hass fruit of the season, the trees are not taking a vacation. Right alongside the branches we just picked, fruit from this spring’s bloom is steadily expanding into next year’s harvest.

Managing an avocado grove through this transition requires close attention to several environmental and biological factors:

• Irrigation Management: Water demands shift as temperatures fluctuate in the fall, requiring dialed-in micro-sprinklers to support sizing fruit without causing root distress. Avocados use water all year, and fall is when salt shows: chloride builds up in the leaf tips over the season and tip-burn usually appears in September and October, which is why every irrigation should include a little extra water to leach salts below the roots.
• Nutrient Partitioning: The tree must balance supporting its young fruit while simultaneously hardening current-year vegetative growth.
• Canopy Protection: Ensuring sun-sensitive green bark remains shaded by healthy leaf cover preserves next year’s crop from intense late-season heat waves. Where bark does end up exposed, whitewash protects it.

Read nextAvocado Harvest Season Wrap-Up: Saving the Last Fruit for Kitchen Recipes

Why the Fuerte Avocado Deserves the Spotlight

While the modern commercial supermarket is dominated almost exclusively by Hass, California’s commercial avocado industry was actually built on the back of the Fuerte variety. Collected as budwood in Atlixco, Mexico, in 1911 and brought to a nursery in Altadena, the Fuerte survived the severe freeze of January 1913 that killed most of the other young trees—earning its name, which translates to “strong” in Spanish.

Unlike the pebbly, dark skin of a ripe Hass, Fuertes exhibit distinct characteristics that heirloom fruit lovers cherish:

1. Thin, Pliable Green Skin: The skin stays vibrant green even when ripe, peeling effortlessly away from the pale yellow flesh.
2. Rich Oil Profile: Fuertes boast a remarkably smooth, buttery texture with subtle nutty undertones that elevate toast, salads, and fresh slices.
3. Natural Seasonality: Fuertes naturally mature during late fall and winter (the UC variety chart gives roughly November through March), picking up right as late Hass harvests wind down.

Where Fuerte Came From

The Fuerte story starts with a single tree. In 1911 a nursery employee named Carl Schmidt, collecting in Mexico for West India Gardens in Altadena, took budwood labeled “No. 15” from a backyard tree in Atlixco, Puebla. When the January 1913 freeze wiped out most of the nursery’s young trees, No. 15 came through, and nurseryman F. O. Popenoe named it Fuerte for its hardiness. A grower named John Whedon planted the trees near Yorba Linda, the first Fuerte orchard, and Avocado Production in California: A Cultural Handbook for Growers, Book One, calls Fuerte the variety the California avocado industry was built on.

Fuerte is roughly half Mexican and half Guatemalan in its ancestry, and the Mexican side shows: the leaves smell of anise when crushed, the tree is more cold tolerant than Hass, and the fruit can take temperatures of about 26 to 27°F before damage, against roughly 29°F for Hass.

Why Fuerte Lost the Grocery Store to Hass

If Fuerte tastes so good, many people ask why it is so hard to find. The answer is mostly in the orchard:

• Erratic crops. Fuerte fruit set is erratic, and Fuerte groves swing between heavy and light years even more than Hass groves do. Over 19 years of records through 1982, Hass averaged about 7,249 pounds an acre against 4,842 for Fuerte.
• Pollination. Fuerte is a B-type flower, and its set often improves dramatically when it is planted near A-type varieties. In cool spells it sometimes produces “cukes,” small seedless fruit sold as cocktail avocados. We wrote about what an avocado cuke is.
• The market moved. Hass passed Fuerte in California production in 1972, and by 1990 Fuerte was down to about 2% of the crop.

We compare the two side by side in Hass vs Fuerte: why your grocery store only sells one, and explain why a Fuerte and a Hass that bloom together still ripen months apart in our Fuerte vs Hass season post.

Tree-Matured Quality Direct from Our Grove

Commercially packed fruit often spends weeks moving through distribution centers, cold storage rooms, and chemical ripening facilities before reaching grocery store shelves. Because we manage our trees by hand and pack on-site, we let our avocados hang on the tree until their dry matter and oil content reach peak eating quality.

Avocados do not ripen on the tree; they mature on the branch and only begin to soften once harvested. By allowing our Fuertes to hang until their internal chemistry is completely developed, we ensure that every box delivered to your kitchen softens evenly with the rich, melt-in-your-mouth flavor that store-bought fruit simply cannot replicate.

Be the First to Taste This Year’s Fuerte Crop

Our Fuerte harvest begins in just a few months, and because supply from our small family blocks is naturally limited, boxes sell out rapidly once picking commences. Sign up for our email newsletter right here on our website to receive 15% off your first box and gain early access to orders before public announcements go live.

When the Hass is running, this is the fruit that ships. Our 4lb Hass box and 6lb Hass box ship free, picked the week they go out; between harvests the waitlist on either page will tell you when picking starts. Until the trees are picking again, the avocado scoop, the Hawaiian shirt and our hats ship year-round.

This is part of our complete guide to growing avocado trees — time to fruit, height, roots, leaf health, pruning and picking, all in one place.