Trick for sprouting avocado pits

I'm near the end of a week's vacation, so I'm logging all the little projects that I manage to knock off.

This is one that I've been thinking about for a few days.  Over the last few weeks I've accumulated five or six avocado pits.  I wanted to plant them, but wasn't sure how to keep them moist so that they would sprout.

My solution was to wrap each one in a single layer of newspaper, kind of like a Hershey's Kiss, and place them in holes around the perimeter of a large pot.  I then twisted additional sheets of newspaper to each "stem", and placed the other end in an empty yogurt tub.

These long "ropes" serve as wicks to keep the avocado pits moist:  when I fill the yogurt tub with water, the water slowly gets wicked down to the newspaper surrounding the pits.

It takes about a day for the water in the yogurt tub to get fully drained -- and the soil seems to be consistently moist.

The single layer of (wet!) paper seems like it should be thin enough for the sprouts and roots to break through.


Of course, this is all theoretical:  in principle it should work.  We'll see if anything actually sprouts.

I should note that I'm in the southern hemisphere (Australia), so it's actually springtime here.


I presume that I'll know in a few weeks whether this works.


--GG


Update:  6 Oct 2016 -- Nothing yet. 

Update:  11 Oct 2016 -- It's late spring for us, so during the day the paper "wicks" dry out midway through their length, rather than carrying the water to the dirt.  However, when I come out in the morning the wicks are wet all the way to the dirt, and the dirt is indeed damp. // If I did this again, I would roll the wicks so that they' have a thicker cross-section, so that the core would stay damp (and transmit the moisture all day):  at the moment they're flat, folded-over strips, which doesn't seem to be thick enough.  // No sprouting yet.
 
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