growing an avocado

This little avocado tree has been my pride and joy - or at least the focus of low-key anxiety - since March.  She may look a tiny bit droopy here, but this is just before her weekly drip-feed - I leave the hosepipe on her with a tiny, tiny trickle for an hour or so, since those brown tips to some of the leaves indicate not over- or under- watering, but the probability that there are too many salty minerals in the soil that weren't getting fully leached out.  Nor does she really grow at a leaning angle - but it's a steep hill ... (you'll note Griffith Park sloping away behind our fence).  The umbrella?  It's from the Frog and the Peach, in New Brunswick - token of some very, very wet New Jersey evening. but here strapped to the stake in order to give her some dappled shade when the sun is at its highest.  I think she's already grown nine inches or so since she's lived here - I know that it'll be about five more years before she's likely to produce edible fruit, but believe me, having an avocado tree was high on my dreams ever since I first saw one growing in a Riverside yard back in - I had to go back and check my cv - back in March 1988.  I don't know where I thought avocados came from, exactly, but it had never struck me that the answer might be from one's own garden.