Does anyone know of a genuine Supplier of pure Mexican avocado seed ?

Like many of those interested in growing avocado in cool-temperate areas, I would quite like to get hold of some seed of the pure Mexican avocado type (i.e. var. drymifolia).  Unfortunately, I've found that the internet is awash with fraudulent sellers, claiming to sell pure Mexican seed, but instead selling you the seeds of regular fruit (e.g. Hass) that they bought down at the local store.

If  you (anyone here) have  any details of a reliable American or European supplier of pure Mexican avocado seed, could you list the details here. It would be useful to many on this forum. However, before posting such details, it's important your plant material has passed the "crushed-leaf-test" for the identification of genuine pure Mexican material.  The details of this simple genetic test are given below.

Before anyone in the U.K. suggests Chris (Ipswich, UK), from the youtube channel GoTropicalUK, he has already sold out of his stock.
Seed material can be sent to the U.K.  from the U.S.A. - I've already received seed this way.  I'm assuming it's the same for any seed material posted from Europe to the U.K., but don't know for sure.  

THE CRUSHED-LEAF-TEST
If you want to verify if your young avocado trees are really pure Mexican in origin (or not), then you'll need to do the 'crushed-leaf-test'. This diagnostic genetic test is not age-dependent, i.e. it works on the leaves for both avocado seedlings and mature trees.  Simply crush a leaf between your fingers: the result is either you get a characteristic anise/liquorice smell, which means the material is of pure Mexican origin, or you get a fresh cut-grass-like smell which means it's not.

Just curious, is this the variety of avocados that you are looking for?

Anne Miller wrote:Just curious, is this the variety of avocados that you are looking for?

Thanks for your reply Anne - I've never heard of the Criolla avocado and had to look it up. I couldn't find much information on this Mexican variety online. Two obvious questions I'd like to ask are: is it good to eat and how frost-hardy is it?  I'd certainly be interested to learn more about it.

There were 12 pure Mexican varieties that I was thinking of, most reputed to being frost-tolerant to around  –9°C (15°F) - any alternative names are given in square brackets:  Lila [Opal], Poncho [Pancho], Fantastic, Joey, Brazo Belle [Wilma], Pryor [Prior], Mexicola, Mexicola Grande, Del Rio, May Gloria, Gainesville and Martin.
All I really need is a couple of seeds of one or two varieties from this list.

My quest this morning began with trying to figure out the name of the variety of avocado you were seeking.

Mr. Google gave me this information:

The 'Avocado Belt of the Mexican Republic' includes Michoacán and the State of Mexico. The major cultivars in Mexico are Fuerte, Hass, Bacon, Reed, Criollor, and Zutano

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avocado_production_in_Mexico

The only avocado I have had experience with was when we lived in Florida and there was a tall avocado tree in the yard.  This tree had large avocado fruit as I have never seen in a grocery store. The way we got avocados was to wait for one of the fruit to fall off the tree.

I put in Mexican avocado var. drymifolia which lead me to the link I gave earlier.

Somewhere I read it was cold hardy though now I can't seem to find where I found that info.

The Wikipedia article I mentioned above has a picture of "Avocado criollo from Oaxaca."

The funny thing that I found is they sell the leaves on eBay for cooking.  You might contact one of the sellers to see if they could ship you a seed.

The native, undomesticated variety is known as a criollo, and is small, with dark black skin, and contains a large seed.[19] It probably coevolved with extinct megafauna

Native Oaxaca criollo avocados, the ancestral form of today's domesticated varieties

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avocado#History

I hope you will find some seeds that might work for you.

Hi Mike,

Criolla, just means "from here" or local. With fruits, it is mostly applied to any fruit picked from anywhere that is not a large commercial operation.
I live in a small city in southern Mexico. Saturday is a big farmers market day and I went this morning. This time of year there were about 8 varieties of avocados on offer. Hass avocados from big farms in western Mexico and all the rest were referred to as criolla At other times of year you can get as many as 30 different kinds of avocado.

Melissa Ferrin wrote:Hi Mike,

Criolla, just means "from here" or local. With fruits, it is mostly applied to any fruit picked from anywhere that is not a large commercial operation.  

I suspected this might be the case but wasn't sure, as I found other foods online, described as Criolla (not just avocados) - many thanks for confirming this Melissa. Do you ever see any of the avocados for sale (in the local markets) that bear any of the names in my list of 12, that I mentioned above?

Anne Miller wrote: The 'Avocado Belt of the Mexican Republic' includes Michoacán and the State of Mexico. The major cultivars in Mexico are Fuerte, Hass, Bacon, Reed, Criollor, and Zutano

Yes, I saw the wikipedia link you mentioned.  Melissa, in her reply above, indicates Criolla just means "locally produced", but not in any large commercial operation, and I subsequently discovered that the term can apply to other locally produced foods. In the wikipedia list you gave,  I'd never heard of the variety Criollor. Fuerte is unusual as a pure Mexican variety, as it's not very cold-hardy, at least not to the level of the ones mentioned in my list of 12 above, any of which I wouldbe happy to have seeds of.  The others you mention (Hass, Bacon, Reed, Zutano) are Guatemalan x Mexican hybrids (not pure Mexican), and mature trees of these are frost tolerant to around only – 4°C  (24-25°F) or thereabouts; I suspect Fuerte to be about the same, perhaps – 5°C for Bacon.

Mike Guye wrote:

Melissa Ferrin wrote:Hi Mike,

Criolla, just means "from here" or local. With fruits, it is mostly applied to any fruit picked from anywhere that is not a large commercial operation.  

I suspected this might be the case but wasn't sure, as I found other foods online, described as Criolla (not just avocados) - many thanks for confirming this Melissa. Do you ever see any of the avocados for sale (in the local markets) that bear any of the names in my list of 12, that I mentioned above?

Avocados, and all produce, are not really sold under names in the local market. While I've eaten many different kinds of avocados, Hass is the only variety I could name.

But I can't resist saying the best avocados I've ever had were small, green-skinned tear-drop shaped, and sold by an old woman who was sitting on the street with a basket of them. This was 4 years ago and I've looked for her again every year since and haven't seen her. We plant every avocado seed we eat and about 50% sprout but only half of those make it to be large enough to be transplanted. I'm really hoping someday to find those avocados on one of my trees!

I could put a bunch of different avocado pits in a box and send it to you--but who knows if it'd get through customs.

Melissa Ferrin wrote: ... Avocados, and all produce, are not really sold under names in the local market.

Do any of these avocados, sold in the market, without a name, have smooth black skins, that are much thinner than store-bought avocados like Hass? Can you eat some of these avocados with their skins on?  I'm just trying to get an idea if at least some of these might possibly be pure Mexican types.

Yes,
I was going to post more before but wasn't sure how much people want to read my wordiness.
By my unscientific observations you can classify avocados by

size,
shape,
skin color,
skin texture,
skin thickness,
stringiness of flesh,
color of flesh,
size of seed,
shape of seed,
texture of seed,
ratio of flesh to seed

I'm not sure how to use the table function, but basically, all these characteristics can mix with each other. Many have thin smooth black skins that are not peeled off but eaten.

That is awesome. I just tried the test and we definitely have a real Mexican avocado tree. Thanks for the tip.

Michael Vickers wrote:That is awesome. I just tried the test and we definitely have a real Mexican avocado tree. Thanks for the tip.

It's worth throwing out a caveat that even though I do also use the crushed leaf test, it's not foolproof. Because the Mexican botanical group is believed to be the original source of all avocados, it has the greatest diversity of the three avocado groups (the other two being "Guatemalan" and "West Indian" which is inaccurately named so some people have started calling "Lowlands" instead). The increased genetic diversity of the Mexican botanical group means they can be hard to pin down with a single trait like having scented leaves.

One major example of an exception is the "Del Rio" cultivar, which has fruit that is definitely of the Mexican type (thin skin), but the leaves have virtually zero scent, only the faintest hint. It's also one of the hardiest cultivars.

I would say the scented leaves are a strong indicator of a tree belonging to the Mexican group (or a complex hybrid dominated by that group), but the lack of a scent isn't enough to definitively say a particular tree belongs to one of the other two groups of avocados.

Winn Sawyer wrote:

Michael Vickers wrote:That is awesome. I just tried the test and we definitely have a real Mexican avocado tree. Thanks for the tip.

I would say the scented leaves are a strong indicator of a tree belonging to the Mexican group (or a complex hybrid dominated by that group), but the lack of a scent isn't enough to definitively say a particular tree belongs to one of the other two groups of avocados.

Thanks Winn for clarifying this issue, i.e. an anise smell with the crushed-leaf test is a positive indicator of a Mexican type, but the lack of the smell doesn't always mean you don't have a cold-hardy Mexican type.  Seed provenance can be a difficult one to ascertain, with certainty, as the Mexican types can out-cross (cross-pollinate) with any pollination-compatible non-Mexican types in their vicinity - this will potentially dilute certain features in the offspring such as cold hardiness, fruit characteristics, etc.