Did they survive? Is there an organic spray? I dont want to resort to poison with dogs and kids around.
We grow walnuts and keep poultry (and so do our neighbours). No toxo around, but the rodent pressure is strong enough to sustain a herd of cats. Unfortunately, our cat is antisocial, so we can’t get more mousers.
Honestly, I did expect rabbits, voles and deer. This was new.
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You gotta be adventurous to be growing 150 avocadoes from seed. 
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A significant percentage of outdoor cats have toxoplasmosis, and that’s true everywhere in the world. Up to 40%, and up to 10% of wild rodents in rural areas have it as well. So I wouldn’t be so sure about not having toxoplasmosis in your local cat or rodent populations.
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Most of them will be distributed to members of the cold-hardy avocado project I’m organizing, I will only plant a handful in my yard. This year I distributed ~60 trees to members, so next year it’ll be a lot more!
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I started to say the same thing but didn’t feel like it haha. I think it’s pretty ubiquitous in feral cat colonies and as much as 50% of France adults have it, albeit many without symptoms.
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Oh, OK, so you’re trying to get a cold hardy variety.
These are seedlings of cold-hardy varieties already (mostly “Del Rio,” “Joey,” and “Mexicola,” with a few others), but even the hardiest varieties are pretty marginal here, so I’m hoping to mix the different hardy genetics and get something that can actually grow here most winters.
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That’s a huge undertaking.
Do you think “gene editing” will take the “guesswork” out of this soon?
I don’t have much knowledge of gene editing, but for me it’s not that huge of an undertaking… I’m just germinating seeds and giving them away! The hardest part has been trying to get people to post updates about their trees on a regular basis, but hopefully if one of them flourishes they’ll let me know!
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As someone who loathes “every” and “all” I should be less frivolous with the use of “zero”. But here is a reference map from 5 years ago showing the incidence per 100000 inhabitants by county: https://www.unilabs.sk/media/2022/06/1/6/2022-02-Infekcie-sposobene-parazitom-Toxoplasma-gondii-obr1.png I live in one of the white counties in the West marked PK.
(Now, I am aware, that the figures are not for suicidal mice, but it is a good-enough indicator for me.) Hooray for us and fingers crossed for the future!
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I now have trees grafted or grown from seed at 7 different places - I’ve lost touch or at least updates at a couple, one I don’t have access to right now so yeah I understand that. I give them away assuming I’ll probably never see them again and hope to hear later. Good luck with this - I’ve been reading through all the work you’ve done in your older thread.
If I’m up that way - I would love to test a couple in my mtn location. At 6000ft in the San Gabriel mtns it is a challenge to grow avacados - but im happy with a nice one in my greenhouse right now. The first of a dozen that I’ve grown to make it this far.
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At least a few of them appear to have survived the disentanglement. Here’s one of the 6 pots (the only one with 3 sprouts), it looks like a total of 8 seedlings have come up so far among all the pots:
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On the left is a wild Jaboticaba (Plinia sp.) from Corrientes, Argentina, and on the right a Yellow Jaboticaba (Myrciaria glazioviana). Will be waiting a few years for these two.
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Both of my first-year nectarine seedlings have turned very pink since I planted them out about 2 months back, but seem otherwise happy enough:
I expect they will be dying from extreme PLC in about 11 months, give or take, but they’ll get at least one nice growing season first. They are right next to the large peach tree that’s got PLC bad this spring, so there’s no doubt that these will also get infected by end of next winter.
They’ll be getting their first dose of fish emulsion soon.
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I always feel a little sad when pulling these guys (+ omnipresent peaches and hazlenuts) out. If I didn’t, we’d live in a walnut forest. Maybe it’s because I come from a region where walnuts are the size of cherries and the trees no taller than 5m.
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I bought a Red King apple tree from Grandpa’s Orchard last year, and when it leafed out there was one set of flower buds. I collected the pollen and crossed it with frostbite, one of my favorite apples. I got 3 apples from the cross with a total of 28 seeds. The seeds were cleaned and dried with hydrogen peroxide and stored them in the fridge until December, as recommended by Steven Edholm. To save space Peat pellets were used, one seed per pellet. I then put them in my unheated garage, where temperatures will get to the mid 30’s in the winter. This worked well, about half of the seeds germinated, the first ones germinating about a month after going to the garage. Starting them in December produced about 8” of growth under the plant light, hopefully this will shorten the time to grafting and fruit production.
Red King has reddish bark and leaves, and as expected about half of the seedlings do also, as shown in the photo. I am not sure if the question of red bark=red flesh has been answered, but hopefully in a few years I will have some evidence to present.
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Nice, is yours the red fleshed version I read about? Love the apple experiments.
The King Red I bought from Grandpa’s does have red flesh, but there is not much on the internet about its eating qualities or how long it keeps. It sounds like some of the red flesh varieties that are being trialed now have textures or flavors that are not optimal. I am new to red flesh apples other than buying LucyGlo and LucyRose at the store, so I am going by what others have shared.
I chose frostbite for the cross because it is crisp and firm, has an interesting brown sugar type flavor, keeps a long time, is precocious and bears every year, and extremely hardy.
One Green World still has King Red available along with LucyRose, as of today.
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