By Gosh.
Well, I can't resist posting just one more April Fool's Day Botany article, even though I tried using restraint by only posting one such prank in my President's Letter this month. Being both the SDHS president and newsletter editor gives me ample options for writing about this sort of fun and I can't help myself when the opportunity presents itself to do it more than once. Look at it this way, you have until next year before I will do this again.
Enjoy!
From the Avocados From Mexico website comes this genius prank -
"AFM Launches New Fortune Avocados!
There’s no luck involved in finding a perfectly ripe avocado — Avocados from Mexico are always fresh and always in season — but now there’s luck to be found inside your avocado.
That’s right, starting next month you can get your hands on the first ever Fortune Avocados from Avocados From Mexico. These little green oracles look, feel, and taste the same as regular Avocados From Mexico, but they hold a fortuitous little paper fortune inside.
Through the use of a groundbreaking horticultural technology, the team of scientists and growers with Avocados From Mexico developed a new genus of avocado tree that can grow an avocado without a pit inside. The first trees took about four years to produce fruit, but today new pitless avos are forming on the branches daily.
Not wanting to stop there, we used our proprietary insertion technique to place a fortune-cookie style fortune printed on edible wafer-paper inside the avocado without disturbing the integrity of the fruit.
You can find your fortune soon, as more than 150,000 pounds of Fortune Avocados are expected to hit produce aisles in May. Good luck and may your next avocado bring you good fortune!
Think you can predict the future? Share your best avocado fortunes with us on Facebook."
"UPDATE: April fools! We dream of the day when fortune avocados replace plain-old cookies as the future-teller of choice, but this April Fools’ Day announcement hasn’t become a reality just yet. Besides, we love our pits as much as we love the delicious green fruit itself — without those life-giving seeds, there would be no avo trees!"
I don't know if anyone shared any avocado fortunes on the Avocados From Mexico Facebook page as they asked, but if they did, the following might have been some of them . . .
. . . Excerpt courtesy of the Carol J. Michel website; here are Fortune Cookies For Gardeners. Please visit the post to read the all the gardener's fortunes written there.
Fortune cookies for gardeners:
“All your weeds are wildflowers.”
“A well-pruned garden is the sign of a gardener with too much time.”
“All wildflowers are not weeds. All weeds, sadly, are not wildflowers.”
“She who eats from her garden will never go hungry.”
“To find the good in your garden, visit other gardens.”
“Sow the right seeds.”
“Watch for falling leaves, then look up.”
“Count your roses, not their thorns.”
“If you want to enjoy a happy life, plant a garden.”
“A life awaits you in your garden.”
“There is life in a garden wherever there is a gardener.”
“Without a garden, one can never be truly happy.”
“From your garden comes your life.”
“She who looks for gardening advice from a fortune cookie should go read a book instead.”
About Carol:
"Gardener. Author. Owner of the world’s largest hoe collection. Keeper of the secrets to happiness in your garden. Collector of old gardening books. As the owner of all these titles, Carol J. Michel mixes horticulture and humor in her presentations on a wide variety of gardening topics."