@@Virginia-vn7ud awesome! Do you get a lot of fruit?

That is a great idea. I think my latest avocados roots cooked a bit recently after I moved a planter away from it.

You’re welcome! If you don’t have any organic material in your soil you can water as much as you want 😉

You bet! I’m lucky to have found his videos early on when I started gardening. I did have a dragonfruit in a pot that kept getting yellower and yellower until I changed the soil tho 😂

Yes of course! Appreciate you watching!

That’s right! He’s the reason I have so many avocados 😂. I bought them from him too!

Good to hear! Also amazing that you’re growing avocados in Canada 👀

@@GrowsGoneWild still experimenting and no fruit yet. My Reed flowered a ton this year, but stuck in the male state.

@@budstik still very cool. Hope you can get them to set!

I’ll bet your plants look amazing 😂. Gary has been saying the same thing about potting soil for 20 years. I’m always surprised when I see growers with huge collections in SoCal don’t know about Top Pot.

@@GrowsGoneWild tell me about it they even look at you weird as if you don’t know what you are talking about 😂 My avocados look amazing as well as guavas, sumo orange, mangoes, dragon fruit, blueberries

@@moj8945 agreed! The crazy part is, you just need to buy a bag and try it and compare the difference. I have tried growing in compost and in a mineral based soil. Compost didn’t work lol. I had a dragon fruit in compost for a couple months and changed it to acid mix and it grew like 20 times its size and gave me 8 fruit in the same year 😂

@@GrowsGoneWild the good thing is nothing has died for you 😂

@@moj8945 I was lucky to see Gary’s videos pretty early in my gardening career 😂. I just had a mulberry I grafted last year die, so I’m not perfect 😂

I hear that. Would have saved us both some heartache!

Thank you and thanks for subbing! Sounds like a great place to be for the summer 😂

Thank you Rich! You have quite a collection yourself 😉.

@GrowsGoneWild thanks! Just beginning to learn more about avocados and lucky to have a massive rootstock to multigraft with 😅

@@RichsTopGardening that always helps!

Thanks so much and best of luck to you! I have been less strict on my mix these days depending on my needs. I am doing 1/3 peat moss, 1/3 pumice, and then either more pearlite or sand depending on whether I am focusing more on keeping the container lighter or not. I just throw in a couple scoops of charcoal, nothing too strict. I feel with the peat poss and the pumice I have the acidity and the aeration/structure and the rest can be adjusted. Which ingredients are you missing or finding hard to get?

@@GrowsGoneWild Thanks! Gary uses pumice and sand (DG I think). I found pumice but it's for construction and I don't know if the grain sizes are correct. I can't find DG at all here, and the various types of sand have different grain sizes as well. I remember AJ (the graft man) mentioning not to use "stabilized DG" and I just have no way of figuring out if the sand and rock I can get here correspond to the exact same thing. So I'm substituting with the best I can find. I'm also using coconut peat instead of peat moss, that's mostly for trying to be more sustainable (apparently bogs are important habitats while coconut peat is considered a waste product from coconut industry; I don't really know what's true but I try to do the right thing). My impression is that the coconut peat retains a lot of water while the overall mix still drains really fast (maybe too fast). It feels airy and fluffy to me, even after sitting for a while. But my trees have only sat in it for a couple of weeks so I guess it remains to be seen how they are doing 6 months, 12 months down the line!

I can see how difficult it would be without every seeing Gary’s soil! The pumice size is similar to pearlite #3. Or I believe it is 3/16 of an inch when I buy at the landscape store. The sand I use is rather fine, I have actually not looked at different sizes as they only have one kind of hand where I buy it 😂. I would just buy sand rather than DG and just make sure there is no salt in it. I have no experience with coconut pest as I only use sphagnum peat moss, but Gary has said that he does not use it as it contains tannins and decomposes too fast, from what I recall. Peat moss is better as it takes a few years to breakdown and also acidifies the soil. The sustainability can also be a controversial topic, but I haven’t looked into it too much. Please let us know how your plants do, I have never tried the coco peat but have seen others growing vegetables do well with it.

Coolest summer in a long a time 😂

SoCal 10a. Honestly I didn’t track weather until last year and it was 38. I think it reached 32 the year before and maybe colder as we had like 20 mins of random snow. That was the first time I ever experienced snow in my area tho 😂

I got it from Laguna Hills Nursery. They have some from time to time. They are Brokaw trees, I heard it’s possible to order directly from Brokaw but there might be a minimum amount you have order as they only sell B2B.

@@artgarcia2340 Gary had said vermiculite is good at holding water, but it doesn’t like to let go of it. I haven’t used it much in a potting mix mostly because it is quite a bit more expensive than peat moss. So I can’t really comment. I do use straight vermiculite in a ziploc bag for starting seeds though. It works great and I get no mold issues like I used to with a paper towel. Next season I’ll run some tests with vermiculite instead of peat moss for a potting mix 👍

The ingredients are peat moss, pearlite, pumice, sand, and charcoal. An easy mix would just be equal parts of peat moss, pumice, and sand.

The little orange ones from Brokaw were watered everyday. Ideally you want to up pot them to a 5 gal right away. I actually water all my plants daily.

These are grafted plants so they will flower and fruit right away. I don’t let first year trees hold fruit but I will be letting my second year trees fruit just to try it out since they are still in pots and I am not focused on growth of the tree. Typically it’s recommended to wait for the third year before letting them hold fruit so the tree can be at a decent size. If you’re talking about a seedling I’ve heard anywhere from 3 years to 12 😂

I’m not sure on the amount actually. I hand water them and it has to be at least 3 gallons at a time. When temps get above 90 I water twice a day just to be safe. In the winter I do water much less but still everyday too unless it rains or is overcast. Once it get cold they don’t use much water or really grow.

Thanks

@@sheens9193 no problem. I just went outside and watered a tree and tried to replicate it into a 5 gallon bucket and it’s about 3 gallons 😂.

Thanks for doing the “test”. I only give mine about 1 gallon/day and they’re dry by the end of the day, maybe even by mid day for the warmer days. I use my own peat/sand/perlite 1:1:1 mix, similar to Gary’s soil. I think I’ll up the water a bit for the ones that are fully rooted in 25 gallon pots. Great looking collection, thanks again.

@@sheens9193 your mix is perfect. Same principle as Gary’s. I would definitely up the water. You can’t overwater in that soil mix. I never let any of my plants go dry if I can avoid it.

Thanks! I’m in SoCal too, in zone 10b. 5th year in a 25 gallon is amazing and great to know that they can live that long in a pot that size. How much fruit do you think you get a year?

@@GrowsGoneWild It's been a journey my friend. You are SO right about the SOIL being the number 1 thing for container growing avocados. I'm in the process of switching out all my containers to Gary's Top Pot Soil. I've heard in a recent video that Gary's friend had 80 fruit on a 24 inch box container.

A few of my trees were oxygen deprived due to organic mixed soil and too dense of mulch layer. I went to palm tree frond mulch without the hard pieces and plan on taping a heavy duty aluminum foil around the containers this summer. I've got sunshade as well. What a learning experience. Have YET to get any avocados so far. Was using fish fertilizer once a week last year and the salt messed up the trees. Using dry granule now.

I've got 2 little cados(wurtz) , 2 kona sharwils , 1 gem , and 1 baby gwen.

@@thesearentthedroidsyourloo1880 yup, I have seen that video! The best part about using a mineral based soil is not worrying about overwatering. I’ve seen people concerned about it raining too much and that’s just such a weird concept for me, my plants love the rain 😂