Category: Environmental
How do you prune an olive tree – and why?
Posted by Moona on February 9, 2009
By Magnus
I asked folks from a local tree nursery to come and have a look at our trees. We’d heard it was time to prune everything (before the sap starts running again when it gets warm).
So he came on Thursday despite the rain. It’s rained here most of the last month, but mostly downwards – not horizontally as I remember from Scottish parts.
We started with the olives – we have 6 or 7 of these, all completely overgrown, covered in lichen and devoid of olives in season. These are all signs, I am told, of a tree left to its own devices. Their shoots take up all their energy and too much leafage on top means shade and humidity in the lower sections, leading to mould and lichen and moss, which hardly help out.
The solution Mr Nursery and others have told me: chop down almost everything to about 3m high (now they’re double that height). Paulo says when you cut them back they go into mass growth and reproduction mode in defence – which gives you a bumper crop of the oily stuff. A site I found on the internet said “a bird should be able to fly through it†once you’ve done the pruning.
OK so that’s straightforward enough. In some cases we’ll loose a lot of shade if we give them a military crew cut, so we’re holding back. Probably blowing it by partially cutting.
Anyway, I asked, how many olives do you need to make oil? Turns out the ratio is a whopping 500 kilos of olives will squeeze down into 20 litres of virgino puro… Each tree can produce up to 100kg. (I think I got these number right).
So hang on let’s get this straight: 500 kgs which is probably hours of picking and hauling onto wheelbarrows then to vans or tractors, to a mill (possibly our own, as part of the watermill?) is a meagre 20 litres?? We could go through that in a few months. Jeeez. Can this be worth the hassle ?
Need to find out more.
2 Responses to “How do you prune an olive tree – and why?”
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February 9th, 2009 at 13:54
Very interesting story about the brambles. My first reaction after reading a few sentences and especially after reading about what your local guy said, was, “No, ignore him!” You can’t do heavy ploughing on those terraces — they are hanging on by their fingernails. Everything would crumble into a large landslide. To my mind it could have tragic concequences. He’s from the old school. And keep the light from the soil you don’t need for other things, and wait for a while to plant things like lettuces, but for trees and shrubs you can make holes for them through the mulch. For the trees you have planted so far — surround them with cardboard and mulch and if a bit of bramble gets through, snip it off below soil level. Also, as far as I can rememer from my little book, you can actually plant some light salady stuff on top of all the mulch if you put a bit of soil or compost on the very top. Like rocket, lettuce, maybe even a few radishes although they are root vegetables. Anyway, veg that grow upwards with a shallow root.
And remember, don’t you get blackerries from the brambles? Couldn’t you cultivate a small corner with them, give them a good prune and see if the berries become juicier and bigger?
I reckon the cardboard worked pretty well on my garden last year. I planted potatoes on some of it and by August I could dig through it quite nicely. With your brambles it’ll probably need longer although I tell you the docks, buttercups and nettles were/are hard to eradicate and I still have masses to do.
So, after thinking all this I was delighted to see Paolo’s reaction.
February 9th, 2009 at 22:09
I love olive trees. Olive wood makes beautiful furniture. You could use the chopped wook to make some little stools with enough left over for wooden porridge bowls and spoons