Interesting.
I still remember that we carefully split the avocado pit with a knife (after eating the avocado), to speed things up, but without opening it up too much. We stuck three or four toothpicks into the pit around its circumference, and set it half out of water in a drinking glass, with the toothpicks resting on the edges of the glass. After the roots started coming out the bottom of the pit and a sprout appeared at the top, we set it in potting soil, and that was it, except for constant transplants into bigger pots.
I don't remember what kind of avocado it was, except that the leaves were dark green and shiny.
Bad news update....
My friend ended up having all his oranges freeze. I made a mistake on my earlier post describing the situation though, where I said that he had 200 acres of oranges. Actually he owns 200 acres of land but only has oranges on about 45 acres. And around 5 of those acres had already been picked.
Today a rep from the packing house came out to do an inspection. He had already done a drive-by on Sunday morning and the temperature at that time was 19 degrees. The oranges have been frozen and are only good for juicing, which must happen within 7-10 days, which is when they'll start going bad.
It costs $13 per crate to pick them, but the packing house only pays $15 for a crate of juicers. Not very good money but at least it'll get them off the trees before they go hard. He said that frozen oranges end up getting really hard and won't want to fall off of the trees. It's fine if they rot on the ground, but if they rot on the trees it'll promote diseases.
Sigh! All that hard work for .... well, I was going to say nothing, but actually the hard work still paid off, because we know we tried.
There's going to be some busy picking crews for the next week.