What We Took On: A Walk Through Our 10-Acre Grove Planted in the Mid-1970s
This is the grove we took on: 10 acres of avocado trees in Escondido, planted in the mid-1970s by Kirk’s parents. Both of them were career Navy officers, and the grove started as their side project. After Oma, Kirk’s mother, passed away in 2024, the grove came to our family, and we moved back to Southern California to carry on the family’s history of growing avocados here.
We will be the first to say it: we are pretty much new to this. We are millennial farmers, and we are going for it anyway.
Read nextRaising Kids on an Avocado Farm: Building Legacy in the Soil
A Navy family’s side project
It still amazes us that two people with full-time military careers planted and ran an avocado grove on the side. That is a big part of why this feels like an honor more than a burden. There is a lot of American history in California avocado growing, and being part of it — literally putting food on families’ dinner plates — is something we do not take lightly.
If you are curious how deep those roots go in our part of the county, we wrote about the first avocado tree in San Diego County.
What shape are the old trees in?
Honestly, some of them are super old and it shows. One tree in the video regrew after being chopped back after a drought. Cutting trees back to stumps is a way California growers have kept trees alive when water was short: less canopy, less water demand, and the tree resprouts when conditions improve. It worked, but it is not a quick fix. In the stumping trial described in Avocado Production in California: A Cultural Handbook for Growers, Book Two, a stumped grove produced no crop for two years, and fresh stumps need whitewash or white water-based paint right away so the bark does not sunburn. It is not a rare practice: in the 2011–12 season, industry estimates quoted in the UC Cooperative Extension growers’ handbook, Avocado Production in California, put about 7,800 of California’s roughly 59,600 avocado acres as topped or stumped. We wrote about the practice in stumping every third tree when water was cut.
There is a lot of work to be done in the upper part of the grove, and we are learning much of it as we go. Our post on caring for old and hollowed-out avocado trees covers some of what we have learned so far.
The lower five acres
Down below, the picture is different. The lower five acres are hardly planted at all. That is where the biggest change will happen: we plan to plant a lot of new trees there.
Replanting is not just a matter of digging holes. It depends on water, power and irrigation all being in place first, which is why so much of our early work has been infrastructure. We laid out the plan in revitalizing a commercial avocado grove.
Why do this at all?
Plenty of people have asked why a young family would take on an old grove when so many California growers are getting out. It is not a new trend: the handbook describes how high water rates after the drought years around 2010 set off a “downward spiral of groves going out of business” in San Diego County. For us it comes down to family and to believing that small farms like this one are worth keeping. We wrote more about that in why we will not quit growing avocados.
Follow along as we figure it out. And if you would like to taste what these old trees still produce, our 4lb Hass box and 6lb Hass box ship free, picked the week they go out — with a waitlist on each page for when we are 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 life on our family grove.
