Why We Don't Have Avocados in Battambang

Everyone and their mother wants to grow avocados in Battambang for some reason.  You can buy them from the roadside over near Battambang BBQ, but people still want to grow them and to the best of my knowledge, NO ONE in the area has yet to get a tree to grow well enough to bear fruit.  But that still does not stop many of us from trying.  There are basically three problems that need to be overcome and here is the theoretical idea of how to get an avocado to grow in Battambang.

Problem #1 - Clay Soil and the Water Table

The soil in and around Battambang generally tends to be very heavy with clay which retains a lot of water.  Also, in rainy season the water table beneath the ground can get very close to the surface.  Avocado trees are highly susceptible to root rot and as such they really don’t like growing in Battambang because too much water in the rainy season kills the trees and then not nearly enough water in the dry season kills the trees.

The only way to overcome the naturally occurring soil problem in Battambang and grow trees with sensitive roots is to grow the tree above the ground in a large raised container of some sort with good drainage.  The simplest way is to get a good sized concrete ring of at least 1 meter wide or more and half a meter high or taller.   Put the ring on the dirt and fill it with good loamy dirt with plenty of compost.  If you want it to look nicer you can get a water basin (bien) and bury it about ¼ of the way into the ground and break out the bottom and then fill that with dirt as well.  Plant your tree in the container and make sure that during the dry season you are watering the tree daily.

Growing a Tree

Once you have a place for the tree, growing one is pretty freaking easy.  As a kid you may have done the experiment where you put toothpicks into an avocado pit and set it on top of a glass of water to watch it sprout roots.  What I usually do with my avocado pits is to put the pits into a container and pour in water until only half the pit is above the water and let them sit for up to a week or so.  Eventually you will see the pit crack open and that is when I plant them in a planting bag of good potting dirt.  Soon you’ll have a small tree springing out and after a few months you can either put it into a bigger bag or plant it in the container you’ve prepared.  Be sure to put a bamboo pole or other tall stake next to the tree for support and tie the developing trunk to the stake with scrap fabric or twine.  Every few weeks check the ties to make sure they’re not too tight as the tree grows or move them higher up as needed to support the tree.  After several years of patient care you will end up with a decent sized tree that is almost ready to bear fruit, which brings us to Problem #2.

Problem #2 – Timing of Blossoms

First off, you can never know if trees grown from seed will be good for bearing fruit.  Sometimes you plant a seed, do everything right, but the tree just doesn’t bear fruit.  Typically when growing trees from seed there is no way to know if your plant will bear lots of fruit, just a little, or no fruit at all, its entirely up to the draw of random genetics.  So growing from seed really is kind of a crapshoot if you want an avocado.

On top of your game of genetic lottery, avocado trees typically cannot self-pollinate.  If you love sciencey things you can Google avocado pollination and read up on it, but I will not go crazy explaining it.  However, different trees have different schedules for releasing pollen but the time for receiving pollen is usually first and the time for releasing pollen comes later.  Even if a bee comes one afternoon to pollinate a flower, it must come back to the same tree the next day with pollen still on it in order to pollinate that particular tree.

If you are crazy attentive to detail and can figure out exactly when your tree will blossom and pollinate you can actually collect pollen with a small brush one day and then pollinate the flowers yourself the next day, but even then there is no way to know whether or not your tree will bear fruit.

There is also some crazy scientific method which I have yet to comprehend by which growers can treat the blossoms in a certain way in order to get a tree that will alternate the times pollen is released in order to improve the chances of pollination.  However, more often than not you need at least 2 trees that pollinate at slightly different times to make it more likely to be pollinated.

Avocado growers get around the genetic issue and the pollination issue by finding a tree that already has been treated and which grows lots of fruit and cloning that particular tree or by grafting branches from it onto the rootstock of another avocado tree.  So if you’ve ever heard someone say that in order to grow an avocado you need a “grafted tree” that is what the term means.  For the sake of my brain, grafting and cloning trees will be handled in a different posting.

So to grow an avocado you need to overcome the problems of the soil in Battambang, and you will need to grow multiple trees, ideally one or more of them will be grafted or cloned trees.  Then if you take care of it properly you’ll only have one more problem to overcome.

Problem #3 – Time

Growing avocados, or fruit trees in general, requires time.  An avocado tree will not reach sufficient size or maturity to bear fruit for at least 5 years after you plant it, possibly more depending on all the random variables of climate, soil quality, plant diseases, watering, etc.

Growing an avocado is a serious investment requiring careful planting, multiple trees capable of alternating pollination times, attention to detail, and a lot of patience.  And now you know why no one currently grows avocados in Battambang.