The great Seattle cold-hardy avocado trial

Since I’m currently distributing a bunch of trees in deepots to members of the avocado project, and not able to help everyone with planting them, I decided to post a quick summary of the way that has worked best for planting these in the ground. If you saw the earlier post about transplanting from deepots to larger pots, you’ll notice some parallels.

First, of course, I have to pick a spot. It should be somewhere that gets direct sun for at least a few hours (and all day sun is also fine if you’ll be able to water in summer). Here’s the spot I picked today, which gets a few hours of morning sun and a few hours of late afternoon/evening sun, but is in the shade of a large doug fir for the middle of the day:

I then cut a circle in the topsoil or sod (in this case), using a trench shovel, and if it’s sod then I take it out intact like this:


Next, I fill the hole with water (this can serve as a perc test if you don’t know how well your soil drains), and while waiting for that to drain, I stick the bottom of the new tree in the mud in the center, digging down a little if necessary to get it at a level where the soil line in the pot is a couple inches above ground level:


I leave that and go get a wheelbarrow load of backfill, which can just be normal topsoil from somewhere nearby, or a mixture of topsoil and aged compost. In this case I have a pile of “garden mix” from Burien Bark that I’m using instead.

Leaving the tree in the pot at the center, I create a donut shaped mound to a level a little higher than the top of the pot, pat it firmly into place, and then wiggle it and slip it out, trying to leave an intact hole the shape of the pot:


Then, follow the earlier instructions for removing trees from deepots:

Check the roots for any signs of rot or drought damage (in the photo below the roots are mostly healthy, but there are a few blackened bits where I let it dry out too much), and slip the tree carefully into the hole. Leave a hose very slowly dripping to water it in while you go to get some wood chips:


And a layer of wood chips finishes it off!

2 Likes