My Avocado Experiment

I eat quite a few avocados and I've always wondered if I could grow a little avocado plant at home. I looked up some information on growing them from the large seed in the middle online a while ago, but then never got around to doing it.

A few days ago my cousin, who has quite a green thumb, posted a picture of her avocado seed on Facebook. The seed had cracked open and had roots and a little plant shoot coming out of the top. She said that it took nine months of the seed sitting in water in a window and changing the water weekly to get to this point. This spurred me on to try it myself. I did some research online, ate the delicious avocado, and got ready to go!

Steps to starting your avocado plant:

Step One - Cut open your avocado and carefully remove the seed from the middle.

Step Two - Wash the outside of the seed with water until clean and gently dry with some paper towel.

Step Three - Insert toothpicks into the sides of the avocado a little closer to the pointy side of the seed. You don't need to stick the toothpicks in very far, but just enough to support the seed's weight. The pointy side goes up and the rounded side with the 'belly button' goes down. The toothpicks are used to suspend the seed out of the water so it's not fully submerged.

Step Four - Fill a glass about two thirds full with water.

Step Five - Place the seed in the water with the rounded side down. Make sure at least a third of the seed is in the water.

Step Six - Wait one day. Once the seed has been in the water for a day, take it out and peel the outer skin off  of the bottom part of the seed (the part that is in the water). This is supposed to make the seed root a lot faster.

Step Seven - Wait, and then wait some more! Make sure to change the water every so often, and if you see the water level go down, just top it up.

I don't expect to see any action for quite a while, but I'm excited to see how long it takes. I'm going to prepare another seed today just in case one of them is a dud and doesn't do anything. I'll post an update as soon as anything happens. If you're interested, there are YouTube videos with grown avocado plants in them. I know that my plant will never get large enough to grow actual avocados, but I think it's pretty neat that you can grow something from a seed that is usually just discarded.

You can plant almost any seed from your fruits. My cousin has also grown a pomegranate tree from seed, and my Mom planted lemon trees from seed as well. My next experiments will be growing a mango tree from the pit and a pineapple plant from the top leaves.

My lemon tree from seed. It's recently grown a baby. It will soon be time to transplant them to a bigger pot.