You should be fertilizing when the first set of true leaves appear, so you should have applied fertilizer before now ..... unless your potting soil came with a starter charge. Your watering strategy sounds reasonable. You should be able to water copiously, so you're flushing the soil each time you water. If you can't do that w/o risking that the soil remains wet too long, I'd say your soil is inappropriate and you can squeeze a LOT more potential out of your plants if you change to something more suitable. I think the MINIMUM standard of appropriateness for container media should pivot on whether or not it allows you to water correctly. The upward progression in pot size depends on soil choice and how/whether you maintain the root system in such a way as to ensure your plants come as close as possible to realizing their genetic potential. You can grow very small plants in very large pots if your soil doesn't support a significant layer of soggy soil at the bottom of the container, but when you grow plants in heavy soils that tend to remain soggy, pot size can be a critical consideration. Keep in mind that small pots restrict growth. Roots need room to rum if you're looking for the best growth/vitality, and it's very difficult tro provide those kinds of conditions w/o risking root root or restriction of root function when using water-retentive soils. Plants grown from cuttings or grafted plants retain the growth phase they were in when the cutting was taken. A good example would be a hawthorn tree. It usually takes about 25 yrs for a seedling to bloom/fruit, but a cutting taken from a tree already having reached the reproductive growth phase is capable of blooming and fruiting as soon as it gets its feet under it. Your tree from a pit is a seedling, so it will need to go through all the growth phases before it can bloom/fruit - which takes even longer in containers than it does in situ. Al

There is at least one cultivar of Avocado that is more dwarf, but the species in general doesn't lend itself to container growing long term. At the very least, it will prefer something as large as an oak wine barrel for size, do you have that kind of room on your deck? It will grow for several years in a 15 gallon sized container, but is unlikely to give you any fruit restricted to a small pot like that.

i grew a 3ft avocado tree from a pit. it was doing great while i lives in california then i moved out to nebraska and within days all the leaves fell off and died and now the tree just sits there looking like a skeleton. when i 1st got to nebraska it was below freezing so i kept it in the garage, then it looked like it died now the temp is up and iwater it and it gets tons of sun everyday and still nothing. and also all over the tree, like on the branch times there is some sort of white powdery stuff. what is that? did my tree die? or isthere something i can do for it???

It doesn't look normal to me. How long have you been trying to get the seeds to root?