So during my time off, I’ve been heavily vested in my home garden. I decided I would take some avocado seeds from a few avocados I purchased recently and plant them to create a couple of fruit bearing trees. After a few weeks and no budding plants I decided to do a little research and find out when the seeds should sprout and that’s when I entered a whole new avocado world that I wasn’t even aware of when I got started.

First, there are hundreds of avocado variety of trees not just a few that I imagined. Most of the types have been genetically engineered and require rather complex “grafting” or cross pollination to bear fruit. It turns out you can’t simply use the seeds from the fruit you buy at the store and expect to them to bear fruit at some point in the future.

Secondly, avocado trees can take 7 to 10 years to begin producing fruit if you have the right grafted/cross pollination trees in your garden! At this point, I’m not sure if I should even pursue this endeavor because once I plant the trees, I won’t likely be in the same house ten years from now to enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Third, I’m not sure which variety of tree I want. I have to admit, a few weeks ago, I ate THE most delicious avocado I have ever had in my life. The avocado had a flavor that I just fell in love with and I figured it was just a great season but I now understand that it must have been a certain variety of tree and until lightening strikes twice and I figure out which variety it was I’m not sure if I want to waste time planting varieties that aren’t as delicious.

The most disappointing thing is that this generally discourages people from planting their own seeds from the fruits they buy at the grocery store. Perhaps this is yet another reason to go organic and use natural seeds to eliminate the complexity and politics of commercial varieties. Imagine a future world where society “forgets” which seeds produce and which ones don’t produce and you have people planting trees everywhere in the hopes of producing crops only to find that they’ve all planted non-bearing genetically engineered seeds!

Forget the potato famine, we’ll one day have the genetically engineered fruit famine come to us one day in the near future.