Obtaining seeds

Supermarkets

Obtaining avocado seeds in France is not difficult – you can buy avocados from Super U or most other supermarket chains. However, the question is what variety you will get and whether they are cold-hardy enough.

The last time I went to the Super U I found Hass avocados from 5 different countries: Peru, Chile, Colombia, South Africa, and Israel. I also found so-called “tropical avocados” of unknown origin and variety. There are several things to remark here: Firstly, while most of these avocados were labelled as Hass, the difference in appearance was big enough that I don’t believe they were all truly Hass avocados. Secondly, when you buy a Hass avocado, we only know the variety of one parent, the mother tree. Now, there is a high probability that the father tree was also a Hass (perhaps even the same tree in the case of self-fertilization), but we don’t know. Some plantations may cultivate Mexican avocados that have a chance (albeit minuscule) of passing on cold-hardiness to these store-bought avocados.

In any case, obtaining seeds from the supermarket is a viable strategy, if somewhat inefficient (as you purchase whole fruits, not just the seeds). Personally, I’ve enjoyed sowing seeds from supermarket Hass fruit just to learn and understand how to care for avocado trees; whether they result in trees that can survive the winter remains to be seen.

As for the tropical avocados, the fruit (and their seeds) were absolutely massive. Some people say the fruit don’t taste as good, but I enjoy them a lot. The seeds surprisingly germinated very quickly in water. These are expected to be the least cold hardy race of avocado trees, so I really don’t think they will survive outside in the winter here, but it’s fun to try anyway.

Jurassic Fruit

Jurassic Fruit is a tropical fruit reseller that sells avocados of many different varieties, mostly from organic farms in Spain. The availability of different varieties depends on the time of year, but in September 2023 and 2024 they had “wild Mexican” of otherwise unknown/unnamed variety; these represent probably the best shot at obtaining seeds with cold-hardy genes. In 2024 I purchased a 3kg box of these fruit and received 46 avocados.

See their website at: https://www.jurassicfruit.com/fr/c332/avocats

Importing seeds from abroad

I have never imported seeds into France myself, but as far as I’m aware, you need a phytosanitary inspection and certificate from the country of origin before the seeds are sent. See: https://www.douane.gouv.fr/demarche/importer-des-vegetaux-et-produits-vegetaux. How to actually perform the inspection depends on the exporting country; for exporting from the United States, see this anecdote: https://growingfruit.org/t/obtaining-a-phytosanitary-certificate-via-usda-aphis/55173.