Hi, my name is Byron Martin here at Logee's,
and today we're going to be talking about Olives, or 'Olea Europaea' here and
this is our table olive; this is the common all of that has been used for
centuries, or even beyond, for food and oil. They're quite easy to grow.
It's a tree-- this one, actually, has formed a shrub, a low-growing shrub. But, generally
they form a little more upright-form to it. And, they have a tremendous resiliency,
in terms of their ability to survive for a long time. Some olive trees go back
thousands of years, and are still growing. So, as a container plant, they make a
great specimen. One of the things that is at the advantage of the olive, is it can
take quite a bit of dryness-- a lot of dryness. It actually prefers that. So, in
terms of watering, we generally let the soil dry down between waterings,
and even if you miss a few waterings, the plant will still be there. As far as
fruit and flowering goes, they flower in the springtime, and the key to getting them
to flower, is that you have to chill the buds. So, these are the growths that were
made up this year-- this summer.
They're going to go into dormancy, as we go into late summer, into fall.
They have to be subjected to hours of chill, and they may say 400 hours. Well, what
does that really mean? Generally, what we want to do is we want to bring them down
into the 40s at night. It's okay in the daytime, whatever it goes to. But, the
40s at night, consistently throughout the fall and going into winter time. If
you do that, as the daylight changes, and the days warm up, you'll see little buds
forming along all these stems and then your flowering will initiate in the
springtime. This is a variety called ‘Arbequina,’ which is self-fruiting.
There's another variety called ‘Koroneiki’ that is also self-fruiting. They're small
olives, but because of their self-fruiting ability, they make great container plants.
Here's a young plant. In two or three years, this plant will be fruiting easily,
even at, probably, about this size. We do the pruning here in the summertime, after
fruits set. So, you let them go through flowering, you get your fruit set, and you
can cut them back as needed to maintain form and size. You have to remember that
these branches that have fruited, many times, they don't feel very well the next
year. So, it's all this unfruiting branches that you see sticking out, here,
that will be next year's crop.
Sometimes, we get is, like, a heavy bearing-- and this one is very heavily bearing--
the one year and then we get sort of a light bearing, and then go back to heavy. So, it
oscillates between years, just because we've taken all the energy out of this
stem, here, with the fruit, and it hasn't really made up enough growth to create
another set of flower buds. In terms of insects, they're pretty immune to it. We have
seen some scales come in from Olive growing areas, but they're pretty immune
to that. If they get really wet feet they can have problems with root-rot so although
we grow our plastic pots, here, and manage the watering, if you happen to be
heavy watering or in an area of high rainfall in summertime or such things, you
might want to grow them in clay pots where they'll dry down a little bit.
Fertilizer-- we give them adequate amounts of fertilizer throughout the summertime.
Want to make sure you stop in probably August or so to harden the wood off, and
these plants can actually be wintered in areas that go below freezing. Go down to about
into the twenties, so pots like this could actually be put in an unheated
porch. They could be put in a cold frame, where we winter many of our large ones,
where it doesn't go below 24 degrees. Anything, as long as you get below 50
degrees for bud set, and above 20-21 or so, in terms of cold damage for them. As
you can see this is a heavyset fruit set. They're almost ready to harvest right
now. They're-- I usually wait until they start changing color before we start
picking them, and then it's a matter of curing them in a brine or other ways. So,
there's a little bit of information on our Olea europaea, or our table olive. If
you'd like more information you can go to Logees.com