Every season is avo season

Locally grown avocados will soon be available for 12 months of the year, thanks to ZZ2’s experiments with different varietals and heights above sea level (650m-1 600m).

Your first impression of Braam van den Heever is that he’s a typical plant man: reserved and not exactly talkative. In his “office” – if you can call a technologically advanced nursery an office – he has clearly become accustomed to never being asked strange questions by his avocado trees, but rather discovering via subtle signs that they’re feeling slightly peeved.

“Braam is the nursery manager,” says Clive Garret ( pictured above), ZZ2 marketing manager, who has been with the company for nine years.

“I always tell people that my work is about loss management,” says Braam, who used to be one of the ZZ2 avocado farmers before starting its nursery in 2012, when it became clear that other local nurseries could no longer keep up with demand.

It’s only when Braam starts talking about the seedling and advanced clonal cultivation process that you realise how fascinating and strictly scientific it is: from the moment the Edranol pits – the so-called nurse seed – are removed, dipped in fungicide and placed in damp sawdust for three to five weeks to germinate, until three months later when the seedling is large enough to be grafted. The young plant is then put in a dark room for three to four weeks to grow without chlorophyll. Then it’s removed and “lightly scarred”, and a small container is attached to the scar for root formation. This new plant is eventually cut from the nurse seed and, when it is strong enough, the eventual cultivar is grafted onto it.

“The conventional seedling process takes 18 months and the success rate is about 85%, whereas the clonal process takes 18-24 months with a success rate of between 30% and 50%,” says Braam. “But if a clonal tree is not 100% perfect you should throw it away. It’s a tough thing to do, but it’s the cheapest option, because if that 98% perfect tree is planted and causes problems later, that’s when it’s really going to cost you.” > tonnes of avos are currently produced annually by ZZ2: 60% to 70% are exported, mostly to Europe, but also increasingly to the Far East, Japan and America. new trees are grown annually in the ZZ2 nursery. They are experimenting with 79 cultivars and 17 rootstock cultivars so that they can produce avocados all year round.