Olive tree help please?

[Bluntness100]

Hi there

Do you know anything about olive trees? We bought two last year, repotted and they have gone crazy. They were trimmed into a rough ball shape when we bought them, they stand about five and a half feet tall, the ball is not huge, and they are covered in what looks to be growing fruit, but there are so many of them.

I'm really concerned the trees can't sustain that volume of fruit, but am unsure if whether to thin out and remove some of rhe fruit stalks, or leave them be, we don't want to damage them.

Does anyone have any experience and be able to advise please?

Look fine to me. Mine are also full of flowers.

Gosh are they flowers? I'm such a novice. I didn't even know they flowered! They look like they are growing to be olives 😳

How did that happen? My tree is 16 and has never had a flower!

The flowers are quite pretty too apparantly, Just googled it!

I genuinely had no idea they did that!

Not sure how it happened, we repotted, I bought some olive tree fertiliser from Amazon which I used once about six months ago, and they have just went nuts.

Mine are the same. It's flowers. Don't worry they look in good health.

Just in case you don’t know, you can’t eat the olives 😁

Wow I wished mine looked like that. I have a small one that's looking quite dead (I'm hoping they have a dormant phase and it will spring back to life!)

Actually just fed them again now, apparantly I should do it weekly during growing season until late July....

Yes when we bought them last summer one had one solitary olive on it, I took a tentative nibble and realised it wasn't edible,,,🤣

You can eat the olives, you just have to faff around with them (soaking, draining, soaking, ad naseum) for weeks! We have about 100 olive trees and start harvesting early Nov, after 2 weeks we've done about 1/3 and give up but get c50 litres of wonderful oil which just about lasts all year :)

We get flowers and pea sized olives on ours. I didn't realise that in Italy, olives aren't harvested until November, so we would never stand a chance getting them to ripen here.

100 olive trees,,,and your own olive oil, that sounds wonderful.

Our solitary black olive last year wasn't good,,don't think I shall be faffing with it,,😳

May I ask where you got them from, bluntness? They sound about the size I want, thanks.

Our local garden centre. It's a big one but not a chain, privately owned and they have some really good stock. To be honest they were an impulse buy as I love olive trees and so bought them, they were about 75 pounds each I think.

That sounds like a really good price actually, as the big ones are expensive.
I'll have a poke around my garden centre next time I'm there.

Of course you can eat the olives.

You just have to prepare them, the same as any commercial grower would. There's plenty of instructions online but basically you soak them in oil or brine for several months.

However it's unlikely that in the UK your olives will grow big enough to be much more than a stone covered in a tiny bit of flesh - our summers just aren't long enough.

Homebase have them. They were first in store when we had all that snow though so will have been hanging around since then. My local Homebase aren't good at looking after plants but yours might be.
We paid £87 and it's a good size and doing well

I have a single olive tree. I have a fence that faces due south and everything I planted withered so I bought something that would like sun.

When I got home I realised the stem was almost cut through - had it on the passenger seat with the sun roof open - but planted anyway.

I get little buds but no flowers yet. OP what is the fertiliser you used? I may need some.

Oh and as for how much a tree can produce, my pear tree produces loads of fruit. So if the olive tree is the same you might have a pressing of oil.

This is the one I bought from amazon. As said I did it about six months ago once, but just read it again last night and it says weekly during growing season, which is now. Apparantly should stop in July so new shoots aren't too tender for the winter..

www.amazon.co.uk/Growth-Technology-Ltd-GTOLF1-Concentrated/dp/B004KWIR2C/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=olive+tree+fertiliser&tag=mumsnetforum-21&ie=UTF8&qid=1529305244&sr=8-1

I should have qualified my comment. Obviously you can eat Olives!
I really meant not straight from the tree, as one would eat a cherry.

I'm so impressed with your tree. We have had ours for years and never had anything more than leaves on it. Should we be doing something?

Is it possible it's because bluntness' are a pair? For some fruits you have to have a pair (M & F) in order to produce fruit, but some species and varieties are self-fertilising.
If you have just one tree, maybe they can't fertilise?

That's interesting I never thought of the pair impacts. Could be. They are either side of the front door, so close together.

I did read last night that gently shaking the branches can help pollenise. The fertiliser I posted a link to also gets very good reviews on Amazon.