brazos bell avocado ...... "cold hardy"

[jacquem]

Bought 15 gallon trees from Lukas Nursery (Orlando) and planted as instructed with Lukas potting soil in Titusville, Florida, 6 years ago. Three varieties for 3 seasons.  The BRAZOS BELL is 8 feet tall and beautiful. It produces tons of very little avocados that turn black when "ripe" late June through July. This fruit is HORRIBLE .......... I can't emphasize how useless this tree is.  The fruit is NOT edible ...... bitter and stays hard until it rots. I have tried fresh fallen/ brown paper bag/ one,two,three day, etc. sitting out. You can not peel the fruit as skin is paper-thin.

[Squam256]

This  applies to most of the Texas avocados we’ve grown honestly.

[FloridaFruitGeek]

That's been most people's experience growing 'Brazos Belle'/'Wilma' in Florida. Apparently it does better in its home region of Texas, but here in Florida the humidity seems to make virtually all the fruit drop off prematurely, so they don't do anything like a proper ripening. I have occasionally gotten a few fruits of this variety to stay on the tree long enough to what seems close to a full maturity in September, and the flavor was ok, but not nearly as good as the other Mexican varieties.

It is for this reason that Hopkins Nursery, the wholesale source of most of the Mexican variety avos in Florida, has stopped propagating 'Brazos Belle'.

In the Gainesville/Ocala area, we've had much better results with Mexican avocado varieties 'Opal'/'Lila', 'Del Rio'/'Pryor', and 'May', which is probably the same variety as ''Joey'.