@drymifolia
Awesome project, I get it that you only sell in the US, even if you did sell to Europe I think those plants in containers are a lot more vulnerable to cold damage, so its kinda pointless to containerize them
We aren't selling the trees, we are only distributing them freely to local members, and they are only in containers for the first year or two while waiting to be distributed to members to be planted in the ground. The small container trees are brought into the greenhouse for bad freezes, but I do leave them out for the first few mild frosts in the fall to help cull the most extremely frost sensitive among them.
Are those seedling that you got currently (50 plants) originate from the hardiest mexican parents (Lila, Joey, Fantastic ) or where did you get them from?
I think the problem is really getting all those seeds even in the US
Let alone getting them to Europe, If I could somehow get my hands on 10000 seeds of the hardiest Mexican avocadoes, thatd be probably the best way to start
Do you think there is a way to do that in the US? Im talking really large quantities, at least 500-1000 seeds or even more, but only from the hardiest named varieties
No one grows these cultivars in the kind of quantities you're talking about seeking. In the first 2 years of our project I've managed to get about 200 seeds of allegedly hardy cultivars. If you click on the "seedlings" list for the trees, you can see all the seedlings currently still marked as alive, and each one says what the seed parent cultivar is:
https://www.drymifolia.org/trees.php?subset=seedlingsSo far the hardiest among the early seedlings are Duke and Aravaipa, but this year we're growing a bunch of new cultivar seeds like Del Rio & Joey for the first time, so those will be distributed starting about one year from now.
I think you would be better to get scions of the most cold hardy varieties and cross pollinate them to maximise the tolerance factors from all parents into the seedlings.
This is the long-term plan for the project. My small ~300 square ft greenhouse has five multi-graft avocado trees planted in the ground, and once those begin to produce seeds they will be the primary source for the project. I will cull any varieties that seem to have more frost-tender seedlings, but will otherwise cross-pollinate all the cultivars in the greenhouse with overlapping flowering dates.
So far this spring, Duke, Joey, "Rincon Valley" (unknown cultivar collected from a publicly accessible tree), and Walter Hole have all flowered and appear to be setting fruit (i.e., some flowers didn't fall after closing up the second time), but it's too early to know if any of them will actually hold those fruitlets to maturity. Aravaipa, Stewart, and Ganter also have buds that haven't opened yet, but only Aravaipa is big enough to hold fruit among those.
I hand pollinate 3x per day to try to catch as many as possible. Last spring the grafts were too small to support fruit so I didn't hand pollinate and no fruit set when they flowered.