How We Pick Avocados from the Top of the Tree
We pick the top of an avocado tree with a pole picker: a long pole with a small cutting basket at the tip and a rope that snips the stem, so each avocado drops into the basket instead of onto the ground. We need it because a mature avocado tree does something inconvenient. It puts a good share of its crop exactly where you cannot reach it: high in the canopy, on limbs that will not take a ladder, and often the best-sized fruit on the tree.
You cannot simply shake it down. An avocado that falls fifteen feet onto hard ground is bruised fruit, and ground-dropped fruit cannot be sold anyway. So it comes down one avocado at a time.
How tall do avocado trees get?
Taller than most people picture. The University of California growers’ handbook notes that a Hass tree left unpruned may reach 50 to 60 feet. One old Mexican seedling planted in Santa Barbara in 1895 stood 56 feet high by 1937, with a trunk more than three feet across. Even a well-managed commercial tree carries fruit well above ladder height.
Growers deal with height in different ways. Some upright varieties can be planted close and kept short; the handbook mentions Reed growers holding trees at 10 to 12 feet. On steep ground, where ladders are unsafe and harvest is already slow, it recommends a regular topping and pruning program. In a later UC trial on stumped Hass, trees trained to a central leader and topped at 14 feet could be picked entirely from the ground with picking poles. The same handbook is candid that pruning trials have not been shown to raise yield per acre; the payoff is cheaper, safer picking. Older groves like ours, though, have limbs that went up long before anyone thought about picking height, and that is where the pole comes in. We wrote more about how tall avocado trees grow and why we keep ours where we do.
The pole picker
The tool is beautifully simple and has barely changed in decades. A long pole, a small basket at the top with a cutting edge, and a rope running the length of it. You reach the basket up past the fruit, position it so the stem sits in the cutter, and pull the rope. The stem is cut and the avocado drops into the basket rather than onto the dirt.
Then you bring the whole pole down, tip the fruit out, and go again. One at a time, for as long as the tree has fruit in it.
It takes more precision than it looks
The part that surprises people watching is the accuracy high-limb picking demands. You are working at the far end of a long pole, usually at an awkward angle, trying to seat one particular stem in a cutter you can barely see — without knocking the three avocados beside it off the branch.
Get it wrong and you either miss the stem entirely or you dislodge fruit that then falls and is lost. It is a genuine skill, and it is why harvesting a tall tree takes as long as it does.
Ours is an old tool that has needed work over the years. We wrote up repairing and maintaining a vintage pole picker for anyone keeping one alive.
Why we go after every one
It would be easier to take the reachable fruit and leave the canopy. We do not, for two reasons.
The first is plain economics on a small family farm. Fruit left in the tree is income that never existed, and when you have run the numbers we have run, the avocados at the top matter.
The second is that the fruit up there is often the best on the tree. It has had the most sun and the most room. Leaving it behind means leaving the good stuff.
Why so much fruit ends up at the top
It is not bad luck. Avocado trees form their flower clusters on the outside of the canopy, on the shoots with the most exposure to light. Where the tree gets sun, it flowers, and where it flowers, it fruits. Shaded interior branches carry very little.
Crowding makes it worse. The handbook describes how many California groves were planted with extra trees meant to be removed once the canopies met. When growers never thinned them, the groves became so crowded that the only production left was in the upper canopy. The same light-seeking habit is why pruning takes care. The handbook’s rule is to prune in spring and never after the summer flush: in a UC trial, trees pruned in October lost most of the wood that would have fruited the next season.
Knowing which ones to take
Reaching the fruit is only half the job. Avocados do not ripen on the tree, which makes the tree itself our storage unit — we pick to order rather than stripping everything at once. Commercial crews usually work a Hass tree in passes: they size-pick the largest fruit first (size 48, about 7.5 to 9 ounces, and up), come back for at least one more size pick, and finish with a strip-pick that clears the tree. The handbook also recommends having at least a third of the Hass crop off the tree before April, so the tree has a good return bloom the next spring. Judging maturity on the branch is its own skill, and we covered the tells in shiny versus dull avocados.
For fruit you can reach by hand, the goal is the same as with the pole: a clean break at the stem without tearing the branch, which we show in our stem-snapping guide.
Every box we send out is picked this way, the week it ships. Our 4lb and 6lb boxes ship free.
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.
