Avocado trees? In Seattle?

October 9, 2023 10:09 PM

PNW GardenFilter: As a result of mixing kitchen compost into my vegetable garden, I now have two avocado (hass) saplings and one peach sapling in my Seattle backyard. I'm guessing these trees aren't going to survive the winter without some help. What should I do?

They're small enough that I could pot them and bring them inside this winter. Should I do that, or cover them with freeze cloth when it's cold? Long term, is it even possible to grow these trees in zone 8b? Experienced gardeners, what would you do?

posted by qxntpqbbbqxl to Home & Garden (7 answers total)

Best answer: Yes definitely bring them inside soon. I am growing two Hass avocado trees indoors in Seattle. They have lush, healthy leaves, growing quickly in a sunny window, but I don’t expect them to ever produce fruit. The main challenge with them is they can get kinda ungainly if we don’t stay on top of pruning them, in their quest to reach the ceiling! Peaches can be grown in Seattle outdoors but I would be surprised if the commercial variety you have is a good fit for our climate.
posted by oxisos at 10:37 PM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don’t know about the avocados, but the peach isn’t going to be worth giving yard space to. It is going to be a weird hybrid, and it isn’t grafted to a proper rootstock, so who knows what it will produce, if anything.
posted by rockindata at 3:55 AM on October 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Some good varieties and info on growing peaches in the PNW here.
posted by sevenless at 8:05 AM on October 10, 2023

Best answer: Connect with the Drymifolia collective about the avocados.

Let the peach have the yard space. Weird hybrids (vs. grafting) is how native americans got “…for the Indians have, and ever had greater variety and finer sorts of them than we… I have seen those they call the yellow plum-peach that have been 12 or 13 inches in girth,” per this interesting history of peaches in North America.
posted by aniola at 10:13 AM on October 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

from the link above (with the collective anyone can be a part of just by growing a few pits from their compost, who are trying to find a few new cultivars of avocado to thrive outdoors all year in Cascadia)

In the first "outdoor" winter of our project (2021-2022), only eight out of about thirty first-year seedlings survived, and all of those were seriously damaged by a six-day freeze with a low of 16°F (-8.9°C). Most of the survivors re-grew vigorously from their roots the next growing season, reaching at least the size they were prior to the damage. Had they been larger or older, they may have survived above ground as well. In any case, it seems likely that most avocado seedlings (even from "hardy" cultivars) will not survive temperatures much below that level. Unfortunately, that is a minimum temperature that most of our region has historically experienced at least a few times per decade, even in recent decades.

posted by aniola at 10:23 AM on October 10, 2023

I have known a compost peach to reach full size and bear a decent crop two years in four on the Olympic Peninsula. A Seattle yard with sun doesn’t seem impossible.
posted by clew at 9:44 PM on October 10, 2023

oh, certainly its not impossible that a compost peach night end up making decent fruit. If it is a weird hybrid, it might even be delicious. Or it'll be kinda gross and grainy. Most likely, it'll get peach leaf curl and die, because that is what peaches like to do in rainy places. I am just saying that fruit development is a whole complex thing, and it can be worth it to take advantage of that knowledge, especially when attempting to grow peaches in a climate that is quite hostile to them. Considering that a Naniamo peach bare root can be ordered for 40 bucks, if the goal is actually getting peaches to eat, from your backyard that's a much more likely path to success.
posted by rockindata at 4:13 PM on October 11, 2023