It’s hard to love a plant with a death wish. I’m on my third generation of spindly unwell looking avocado trees now and it’s starting to get old.
It’s hard to believe that a plant that springs spontaneously from seeds carelessly cast into the compost could be so very hard to keep alive. Pretty much all the other trees I’ve sourced from the prompt and knowledgeable online nursery Daley’s Fruits have taken off without a hitch, but after several years of abject failures I’m starting to feel like the Avocado Angel of Death.
Or maybe it’s not me, maybe it’s my naughty chickens. My avocados need protection, by which I don’t mean armed body-guards, though I’m not saying I haven’t considered that.
I planted a low-chill nashi pear a few years ago in a perilous location, right next to the giant trampoline that is the social hub for all the neighbourhood kids. It’s going gangbusters, despite the ever present danger of being crushed by pre-teen gymnasts and the surrounding scorched earth environment created by the chooks. The enclosure I made for it out of the slats of a bed base found by the side of the road, for all its “chook-house tolerances”, is still going strong.
And the gate constructed from a surplus-to-requirements Ikea bed continues to serve its purpose of keeping all but the most determined and agile chickens out of my bush tucker garden.
Who knew bedroom furniture could be the key to a flourishing food forest?
With these sleep-related successes in mind, I decided to turn to a wooden cot, long stashed under the house, into surrounds for my two poorly looking avocado trees. You often see cots like this by the side of the road during the council cleanup, so this is a project for everyone, even those without anklebiters.
With the addition of a handful of mismatched screws and a small number of shelf brackets I bought on an over-excited visit to the hardware shop many moons ago, I was able to put two surrounds together from one cot in my dining room in the space of a few hours. Warning: do check the dimension of your door frames before trying this at home.
The first surround featured the rather stylish cot head and foot, spliced together with the cot base (cut in half). The four panels for the other were made by bisecting the two sides of the cot. With a modicum of creativity, I was able to use the holes already drilled in the frame and a few self-tapping screws. The only time I needed a drill was to add the slightly unglamorous pieces of hardwood across the top, which I included to ramp up the degree of difficulty for ambitious or athletic chickens (Winter the escape artist leghorn, I’m looking at you!) to fly inside. Those with fatter or more docile chickens might not want to bother with this addition.
The nice thing about repurposing existing furniture if your carpentry skills are as impaired as mine, is that you can rely on the expertise and functional set-square of the person who put together the joints in first place. So the finished surrounds look fairly regular, despite my inadequacies with a tape measure.
And so far, despite a giant tree being hacked down more or less over the top of them, the surrounds seem to have done the job. The chickens have done their level best to squeeze between the slats but haven’t quite figured out how. The avocado roots are no longer being ripped from the ground on a daily basis in the search for invisible but delicious invertebrates, and the trees are (perhaps overly optimistically) producing new leaves.
On my past track record, it seems highly likely that these avocadoes are still doomed, but at least I’ve done my best to put their troubles to bed. Sleep well, little trees!
