Where Do Avocados Come From? A Kid’s Lesson on Farming and Kitchen Recipes

Avocados come from trees, and farmers do not make them: the tree does, through sunlight, water, soil and bees moving pollen between flowers. Our daughter put it more simply on camera when she said, “God makes the avocados for us.” Our job is to look after the trees and then turn the fruit into meals.

When you spend your days in an avocado grove, your mind stays on the fruit. That was the mindset behind a recent afternoon in our kitchen, when we were planning a creamy avocado pesto and our youngest walked in with a question that stopped the whole shoot.

The great kitchen interruption: who makes the avocados?

While we were talking about blending avocado into sauces, a little voice asked, “How do you know how you can make avocados?”

It is easy to blur the work of farming with the act of making something. As farmers, we prune branches, run the irrigation, spread mulch to hold moisture, and watch for pests. But the fruit hanging in the canopy is the tree’s work. Our job is to look after it.

As we explained to our daughter, farmers do not manufacture avocados. Once the fruit is picked, our job changes from grove caretakers to home cooks, turning the harvest into meals for the family. Rich, creamy late-season fruit is our favorite for pesto.

Read nextWhere America’s Avocados Come From: The 2025 Numbers by Country

How does an avocado tree make an avocado?

Here is the version we tell our kids, with the numbers from Avocado Production in California: A Cultural Handbook for Growers, Book One:

• Flowers: A mature tree can open up to a million flowers in a year. In San Diego County, most Hass flowers open over about six weeks, from late March to early May.
• A flower that changes: Each avocado flower opens twice. The first time it is female and can receive pollen; it closes, then opens again the next day as male and sheds pollen. Bees carry the pollen from flower to flower.
• Very few become fruit: On average fewer than 200 flowers on a tree set fruit and hold to harvest.
• A long wait: Hass fruit set in spring is picked the following year, anywhere from January through August in San Diego County, so a single avocado can hang on the tree for a year or more. That is a lot of waiting for a little kid.
• Ripening comes last: Avocados do not soften on the tree. They ripen on the counter after they are picked.

Why can’t you grow the same avocado from a seed?

This is the next question kids ask. Every avocado seed is genetically new, so a pit from a Hass does not grow a Hass, and most seedlings are not as good as their parent, according to the handbook. A seedling may take up to 10 years to bear fruit, and some never do. That is why growers graft: they join a piece of a known tree onto a young rootstock, and grafted trees mostly bear in their third year.

Why do farmers plant two kinds of avocado trees?

Because of the way avocado flowers open. Varieties come in two flower types, called A and B, and the difference is timing. Hass is an A type: its flowers open as female in the morning and as male the next afternoon. Fuerte is a B type: female in the afternoon, then male the next morning. Planting the two near each other means there is pollen ready when the other variety’s flowers are open.

The handbook notes that interplanting A and B trees with overlapping branches raised fruit set by 40 to 150 percent in earlier studies. Big blocks of one variety can still set a good crop, because in cool weather the female and male stages overlap on the same tree. For a kid, the short version is that the trees help each other, with the bees as messengers.

From avocado pesto back to spaghetti and tomato juice

Of course, deep kitchen philosophy ends as fast as it starts. Right after sharing her thoughts on where avocados come from, our daughter moved on to dinner: spaghetti and tomato juice.

That balance is life on our family farm. One minute we are talking about soil, irrigation or a whole-food avocado dressing, and the next we are handling toddler dinner requests at the counter. Feeding a family from what we grow does not have to be formal. It is about bringing the next generation into the kitchen, answering their questions honestly, and appreciating where food comes from before it reaches the plate.

Embracing the unscripted moments of farm life

Running a family farm in Southern California brings plenty of hard work, from storm preparation to long harvest mornings. The moments that keep us going are these simple kitchen exchanges, where the next generation learns that real food comes from healthy trees, living soil and a family that cares for them.

For the grown-up version of this lesson, read life on a family avocado grove. If your kids want to see where it all started, here is a walk through our grove, planted in the mid-1970s.