Last Summer I shared my first season of successful jocote air layering.

Less than one year later & that same jocote tree has begun to grow fruit🤲🏾

When you start learning to grow food, one of the first things you’ll hear is that it takes SO long before your first harvest from fruit trees. It’s rather discouraging, considering none of us are getting any younger.

While it’s true it can take 5+ years to get fruit from many trees, it’s also true that there are ways to curtail this wait. One such strategy is air layering fruit trees.

Although my jocote air layer is less than a year old (from new root development), the plant material/limb taken from the established, fruiting tree is many years old. Therefore, my new air layer performs in the way the parent tree does. It doesn’t know its roots are only a year old. It only knows it’s time to fruit🤲🏾

A large jocote tree was knocked down on the farm, but not uprooted, during a storm last year. Rather than cut down the toppled tree, I waited until it broke dormancy to see if it would survive in its newly leaned position. Much to my surprise, though almost parallel to the ground, the jocote flushed with leaves again as temperatures warmed in Spring. This was my cue that it was ready to be air layered🙌🏾

I gathered my tools & went to work air layering all of the low hanging branches.

The tree looks even crazier🤪 now that it’s leaning nearly to the ground; wrapped in tin foil, but the more important thing is that in the coming months that jocote will have numerous rooted clones (i.e. brand new fruit trees🤲🏾) that I can remove from the parent tree & plant into the Earth. That means more fruit to eat year after year for the cost of a sandwich bag + 2 zip ties + a sheet of tin foil. That’s some good math😏