I have a small project that involves planting several Avocado trees I recently purchased from the local nursery in RootBuilderII (RBII) expandable containers along the West x SouthWest side of my house. I have planted Lamb Hass, Stewart, Holiday, Sir Prize, and Pinkerton. My goal is try and keep the Avocados trained low and follow some of the precepts described in Dr. John Yonemoto's presentation here:
http://htfg.org/conferences/2016/2016_JohnYoshimiYonemoto_GrowingandHarvestingtheBestAvocados.pdfYonemoto's Training Diagram:
I started with just a cleared 4' dirt row along my fence:
The 34lb boxes of 96-panel (100' rolls) of RBII arrived last Friday (3/23/18):
The packages came with a couple bags of 10" Zip-ties, but I had already purchased a hundred from the local HD. It wasn't difficult to use kitchen shears to cut the panels to size (I chose 5 per for 20gal pots) and then zip tie through the holes.
I laid the 20-gal bottom-less "air-pots" out with ~8-10' spacing along the fence. This was after rolling out 2-3 layers of weed fabric to (a) keep the neighbor's fruit tree roots out of my pots and (b) adhere to Yonemoto goal of limiting tap-roots. This may come back to bite me down the road, as it will limit the vigor and trunk/branch strength of my trees. But this is supposed to direct energy into fruiting and feeder roots. We'll see.
I then backfilled the pots with a mix of sandy dirt I had displaced earlier from the side-yard, peat moss, Coco-hulls, Perlite, worm-castings, and some other organics. I'm double-staking each tree w/ the center-stake they came with for maximum support. The branches will be supported by trellises that run horizontal to the plane of the ground along the front of the trees. I might try and squeeze a 2nd row of T-bars for another trellis behind the trees to help spread-out the branches. Since the trees will be maintained at a low height, I'm hoping they'll be less susceptible to wind (also they are protected by fence and house), and they should be easier to cover with a frost cloth in the winter. Half of the plants had some measure of root rot coming out of their nursery pots, but I hope they recover and thrive in their new homes. I think my largest concern for the success of these avocado trees lies in the fact that they are getting limited sunlight due to their position between two houses. I'm hoping that will not be a deal-breaker as the angle of the sun rises deeper into Spring/Summer. I will try to post updates on this project over the coming months/years. If anyone else has tried something similar, I'd love to know about it. This evening after work I have to cut the tops off of each of these young trees. That's going to be painful for me.