so should you grow an avocado tree from seed you may have heard many people tell you or you've seen comments online where people have kind of hated on the idea and they've said that you know they're going to take way too long to fruit anyway and the fruit that you eventually get are going to taste disgusting because they don't grow true to type well this avocado tree here was grown from seed from a fruit that came from the supermarket and as you can see it's now producing these beautiful looking avocados here but do they taste any good was it worth the weight and why is it that people say not to grow them from seed we're going to dive into all of that today and I want to start by telling you a little bit about this tree and how it came to be what it is today so my mom and I started this tree 6 and 1/2 years ago and we started it in the toothpick in water method which by the way is no longer my favorite way to grow avocado seeds and I explain a bit more about that in my avocado from Seed video where I compare a few different methods but anyway it was then planted into a pot and it was left in that container for about 3 and 1/2 years just to grow and get bigger and it was actually in the pot for longer than it needed to be but that's just how long we took to get around to actually planting it in the ground sadly about 3 years ago my cat Sparky died some of you might remember him from some of my very early videos he was such a cool cat but we buried him here and at the time when we buried him 3 years ago we planted this avocado tree on top of him so this is a really special tree for that reason and I think it's kind of a nice way to honor animals that you've had by planting a tree for them them in their memory and especially an avocado tree which can live for a very long time some will live for many many decades at the time of planting the tree was only about a meter tall and we put this fence around it to stop the Sheep getting to it but we also put this material here which cut down on the wind and gave it a little bit more protection while the tree was young and here we are now with the tree producing these beautiful looking fruits 6 and 1/2 years from when it was first started from seed on top of that it's also covered in a huge amount of flowers which is so cool to see so at the end of the video I'll aim to share an update sometime from now to see how these flowers turn out and if the tree develops more fruits for the next season but anyway let's pick one of these mature fruits I'll let it ripen for a few days and then we'll give it a taste isn't that so stunning it's got such a shiny and metallic color to it but this is a nice mature size you can feel just like a very mild bit of softness and they've also changed in color from when they were small and green so that's also indicating that this fruit is now mature and ready to pick avocados usually ripen after they're picked off the tree as long as they're picked when they are fully mature all right guys so the avocado has been sitting on my kitchen bench for about 5 or 6 days and it is now ripe feels really really good so we'll cut it open and see how it tastes oh wow look at that but there we go that's how it looks and you can see there's a little bit of brown but overall it looks really nice and the seed here is quite large but you know it's a seed grown avocado so that can happen you can get kind of larger seeds with a little bit less flesh but there's still a decent amount of Flesh there for sure there we go check that out that looks really awesome all right let's try it it's good tastes like a really nice avocado that's really good perfectly ripe going to put a little bit of pepper a little bit of salt on it as well just cuz who eats avocado on its own right here we go try that yum oh I'm so happy with how that's turned out it's really really nice it actually has a really good creaminess to it a nice flavor and yeah I really like it better than the ones from the supermarket to be honest and maybe I'm biased because it was grown from a seed and I like the idea of that but yeah there's definitely nothing at all wrong with this it is a delicious delicious avocado M and check that seed out I might actually grow this seed because it's quite a nice size and large size avocado seeds are going to give you a bit tree in the early stages like the seedlings end up being stronger and just have like thicker trunks because there's quite a lot of energy stored up within the seed which will then kind of transfer and give you a lot of energy in those early stages of a little avocado seedlings [Music] life so then why is it that people say not to grow avocados from seed well the first argument against it is that they take too long to fruit well how long is too long I think that kind of depends on the person and how much patience you have the length of time though that an avocado tree takes the fruit will vary depending on the growing conditions as well as the individual tree because when you grow them from seed there will be some variance as you know this one took 6 and 1/2 years to start producing fruit which is a while but it's actually not too bad I reckon it's pretty good especially considering that it was in a pot for more than half of that time and while in some cases it can be quicker than that it can also take longer maybe like 7 to 10 years even but for me I still plan to be on this earth going well in 7 to 10 years the time's going to pass anyway plus I think the satisfaction of seeing something grow right from a seed up until the Fring stage is pretty awesome they're also very long lived trees too so once they start producing fruit they can continue doing so for many decades and to show you something pretty cool when I was out in the bush foraging for some monstera deliciosa fruits I came across this huge avocado tree it was towering in the Treetops covered in fruit and it had just had an absolutely massive trunk on it as well so it just shows how big these trees can get and how long they can live there's even some reports of wild trees that are over 100 years old the second argument or concern that people have is that avocados don't grow true to seed this means that the characteristics from the parent Tre such as fruit size flavor and other traits are not reliably passed on to the seedlings so basically the resulting fruit from a seed gr tree can turn out different L from the tree that it came from and have its own unique characteristics but is this always a bad thing not necessarily just because a tree and its fruit are not the exact copy of a parent tree doesn't automatically mean it's going to be bad and I've heard people throw around statistics of like only one out of 10,000 avocado trees are going to have good tasting fruit and the rest of them are going to be awful and they're not going to be worth your time at all and I just honestly don't know who came up with that statistic or who decided that but I simply don't think is true but you might still be skeptical and thinking did we just get really lucky well I actually know quite a few friends and other people that have grown avocados from seed right through to the fruiting stage and all of them have been actually really happy with the fruits and I've also seen many people online who have grown trees as well that have had great experiences and are really happy with the fruits that the trees have produced and while I know this is all just anecdotal evidence it just doesn't at all line up with the supposed rare chance of getting a nice in avocado from seed so it kind of tells me that this kind of narrative that growing them from seed is absolutely a waste of time because you're not going to get a fruit that tastes any good is not very good and not very helpful for people who want to try it out and have some interesting stories to tell about it and are patient enough to wait until they get to a stage of fruiting and it's not to say or guarantee that your fruit is going to turn out exactly as you hope and that it's going to taste amazing there is always a chance that maybe the flavor is affected and you don't really like it so much but I think a lot of the time that risk is much lower than what people think it is and there can be other factors as well that affect the flavor of your avocado such as the stage at which that it was harvested because what can happen is if you pick your fruit while it's not mature it can actually turn out quite bitter and not very nice tasting and they often don't have the rich creamy texture that avocados should have so yeah sometimes people may think that the fruit that the trees developed is no good but it may just be that it was harvested before the fruits were fully mature it's also worth mentioning that the first fruits that a tree produces are not always its best quite often fruits will improve in quality and quantity as the tree matures gets larger and there's better root growth and nutrient distribution and energy allocation towards those fruits so you can't always judge a tree on its first fruits that it produces and since they don't grow true to seed one quite special thing is that the variety that you get is going to be unique to that particular tree and that means that you can name it whatever you want as well so this is a Sparky avocado and that's in memory of my cat of course and I think that's kind of cool it's also good to know that some of the varieties of fruit trees that we have today came from the result of a chance seedling or one that was growing kind of accidentally or just without much intention and it's turned out to be a really tasty fruit such as Hass avocados which were just growing in someone's backyard from a seed and they turned out to be an amazing fruit that has then gone on to be propagated more and more and become a widely available fruit so yeah who's to say that your fruit that you get is not going to be even better than the one you started with there is always that chance but even if you ended up with a tree that you didn't like the taste of the fruit you could still graft it even at this stage here you could take off some of these branches and attach varieties that you do like and you could end up with a tree with multiple varieties of avocados if you wanted to and that's kind of like what I did for that apple tree if you remember I did a video where I put three different apple tree varieties onto the one tree but let's just quickly talk about grafting and why that's often The Chosen method with avocado trees and how that kind of thing works so grafting is a method used to address both the concerns we've just talked about so it reduces the amount of time it takes for the plant to produce fruit and it also makes sure that the fruit quality is going to be predictable so let me show you how it works this is a little avocado that I've grafted over here and so all I did was just grew a Little Seedling just like this one just like this one over here and I then went out and found someone that had a h avocado tree I took a little cutting from that tree and then I grafted it or attached it onto my Little Seedling avocado and so the root stock and the base of the trunk of this is a Seedling avocado but the top of it and the whole part that's going to grow and turn into our tree is from that H avocado that I took a branch from and so this means that this is going to fruit in a much sooner amount of time and it's going to be the exact same as the tree that I took this little Branch from and although grafted trees will usually produce fruit much sooner than a Seedling tree it's good to keep in mind that while the grafted tree is still small it will try and produce fruits but it's good to actually remove those first fruits in the first few years just to allow the tree to establish and become more mature and a bit larger before it holds lots of fruits and while you can just use any avocado seedling as a root stock to then graft onto usually the ones that are used commercially or in a nursery are grown from particular varieties usually ones that have positive traits like root strength and disease resistance and vigor although since those are seedlings too they can also be a bit variable guys I'm back at this avocado tree 6 months after I filmed the rest of this video and it's now covered in its next lot of fruits and I've gone through and roughly counted and there's over a 100 avocados on this tree and they just look like the most beautiful fruits as well they so shiny and looking really good but you might still be wondering is it worth growing an avocado tree from seed or is it better just to buy a grafted tree and be done with it well I think it depends on what you value one person might value consistent results and getting fruit as fast as they possibly can and in that case getting a grafted tree is probably your best bet another person might really enjoy the process of growing a seed and seeing it right through into a magnificent tree like this and enjoying the Curiosity and wonder that comes with that and being able to do it all for free and then of course there's some people who just like to grow them as a nice house plant which can also be really cool as for me I'm going to do a bit of both because it would be nice to have some grafted trees and some named varieties that give me predictable results but I also like to experiment and grow from seed because after all how exciting would life really be if we could always project the outcome