Olives...are they temperamental?

[pollyglot]

Hi, I hope someone maybe from a warm climate might help me. I have a grove of about a dozen well-established olive trees, despite their growing in pretty damp soil for most of the year (adjacent spring). They bear very heavily and attract birds by the thousands- these dear little things eat the fruit and spread seed from all over under the trees. Will olives be all snippy about having to share space around them if i was just to let the seedlings grow? They are indigenous to this country, evergreen and ornamental, and will create a wonderfully shady arboretum ... but will the olives die with the competition? they will get loads of sun on their canopy. Nobody here seems to know, as most people plant them in arid soil, well-distanced and leaving lots of air to circulate. Help very much appreciated, thank you.

It sounds like the majority of local people in your country are growing them as a crop in the equivalent of orchards, and they are leaving gaps around them so the fruit can be easily harvested. Wild trees don't grow like that, and since olives are native to where you are, I'm sure they will be able to cope just fine. Many mature trees will overshadow and out-compete their own seedlings around them, and that is how they would naturally space themselves out in the wild.

Portugal here with olive trees. If you want your mature ones to be as healthy as poss with max fruit, its best to remove the seedlings. Whilst they are only little, they are still competing for water and nutrients. Olives do best with a bit of space around them but if you are not fussed too much about fruit then growing the seedlings for a canopy is probably fine, it just means your mature ones will be slightly less happy

We’re in southern Spain & have about 100 olive trees. The worry I’d have is fungal infections which olives can be prone too. They do need plenty of air circulation around them to help prevent this. The old Spanish phrase is that a dove should be able to fly through an olive tree. In other words it should have an open rather than a heavy canopy. When established their roots are really deep so they’ll get plenty of water despite the seedling competition.

Thank you all SO much for the information. I don't want the fruit (too old to go through all the work of harvesting and getting to the local press), but very happy to see the joyous little birds stuffing their little beaks. I'll thin out the seedlings and add them to my NZ native forest to avoid the risk of infection (thank you MissNowt, I didn't know that), but leave some to grow as they will. It's actually amazing how they bear so heavily in what is in effect a bit of a bog from the spring water.