Avocado Adventure

I got a day out of the office today which was great and returned just after supper which was also great. I met with the NZ Avocado Growers Association in Tauranga. The morning was spent in a meeting which went quite well and the afternoon was spent learning about avocado production in New Zealand. Tauranga is a really beautiful place and warm too, year round.

We visited a greenhouse where they produce the nursery stock by grafting scion wood (the top part) with root stock. Here you can see recently grafted material in the foreground with the plastic bags creating a nice warm microclimate for union of the graft. The second row of plants is in leaf but you can still see the graft is bound.

Found a mealy bug

We visited avocado orchards and I was amazed at the size of the trees. I've visited apple and pear orchards and vineyards before and all the plants are kept dwarved so that picking is easy but these trees were huge.

They had to be harvested using these amazing cherry pickers...this one extended 10 metres in the air. The operators were amazing, shooting around the trees, up and down the tree, picking avocadoes. They are maneuvered using three pedals in the bucket so that they can have both hands free to pick.

We also visited the packing house. It wasn't in operation at the time so wasn't tremendously interesting as I've seen apple, pear and cranberry packing houses before.

What was interesting was that the packing house and the two avocado orchards were owned by the same guy, as was a kiwifruit orchard, the picking operation, dairy cows, an engineering firm as well as being the chair of the avocado association...busy guy!