Pruning the olive trees for the next harvest

Most olive trees are planted in soil that is a lower quality than what many crops would like.

The olive trees we are leasing are planting on very high quality soil and it is evident with how healthy the trees are and how much they grow every year.

With the trees growing so much every year we have to prune them to keep them a manageable height and we started that last week before the rain.

There are lots of different ways to prune olive trees and each way has its benefits and downsides depending on how its grown and how it will be harvested.

The goal of pruning is open up the tree canopy so that light can enter to increase the production and quality of the olives.

Without pruning, olive trees in good soil grow multiple feet in height every year and produce many shoots that cross over each other preventing as much light from getting to the inside of the tree.

To make a productive and efficient harvest we have to prune them to help the trees focus more of their energy on growing amazing olives that will be made into delicious olive oil.

For most commercial olive oil the trees are grown tightly together in a hedgerow so a mechanical harvester can come through ad pick them easily. That means they are pruned back to a certain shape every year to make it possible.

With us harvesting by using poles to knock down the olives we need to have access to the inside of the tree and the branches have to be kept at a manageable height so that we can harvest them with the poles.

The goal is for the branches of the tree to look like a tulip where one petal is removed so we can get to the inside of the tree to harvest the olives during that time.

We are also thinning out places where there are 10 small branches all jumbled together and putting all the prunings in a row which will be mowed once pruning is finished.

Each time we are out pruning we are learning how to do it better and make fewer cuts in a tree while achieving the same goal.

Getting four inches of rain in the last few days has limited what we can do on the farm with the fields pretty wet. We’ve been doing a lot of cleaning and on Tuesday we potted up our first planting of tomatoes.

We start these tomatoes in small cell trays and then once the roots are developing well and they are needing more space we move the plants into larger cells where the roots have lots more space to grow.

These tomatoes will be much bigger when we transplant them than our later plantings and that is done to hopefully get earlier tomatoes by giving them a bigger head start in the greenhouse.