Remember when I wrote about chopping the top of my avocado off? (No? You didn’t read that post, you say? Well, here’s the link in case you need a reminder.)
Here’s what the avocado looked like after its haircut:
And here’s how it looks today!
It’s branching out! How exciting! I really wasn’t sure this would work, given my last experience with cutting the top off of an avocado. I think the important difference between last time and this time, is that last time, I followed instructions that said you should prune it back by half when it gets 12-inches tall. This meant cutting off all the leaves which seemed odd, but…. I did as I was told. And it definitely didn’t work. The tree survived, but it didn’t branch, it just created a new single leader.
This time, I waited until there were over 10 leaves on the avocado, and it was about 2 feet tall, and then I cut off just the top along with the top four leaves.
Success! Now that I have three stems or branches instead of one stem, next year, I can prune the tips off of these three stems/branches and create three more branches off of those branches. That will give me nine branches, which, the following year, I can prune the tips off of and get 27 branches (!)…that’s how it works right? This will be fun experiment.
