One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered

by Edward J. Wickson

Old olive trees can be successfully moved a long distance by cutting back, taking up a ball of earth, and possibly a short distance with bare roots if everything is favorable. But do not for a moment think them worth such an outlay for labor, freight and hauling which such a movement as you mention involves. The trees on arrival would probably only be firewood, and if they lived, the time required in getting a good growth and grafting, etc., would perhaps be as great as in bringing a young tree of the right kind to bearing, and the latter would be a better tree in every way. Large limbs can be split and used as cuttings, but the tree would be growth on one side and decay on the other. Use the smaller limbs for hard-wood cuttings and the balance for firewood. The smut shows that the trees are covered with scale insects and might indicate that it is better to burn up the whole outfit unless you learn to fight them.

Darkening Pickled Olives.

Is there anything that will make olives keep their black color when put into lye? When I put my first picking of ripe olives in lye, a large part of them turn green, the black leaving the fruit. My formula is one pound of lye to five gallons of water. Have you any better formula?

By exposing the olives to the light and air, either during the salting or immediately after, ripe olives may be given a uniformly black color. Also, fruit which is less ripe and which shows red and green patches after processing with lye, becomes an almost uniform dark brown color. To do this, the olives are removed from the brine and exposed to light and air freely for one or two days. Your lye was stronger than necessary. With ripe olives it is desirable to use salt and lye together to prevent softening, and the common prescription is two ounces of potash lye and four ounces of salt to the gallon of water after the bitterness is largely removed by using one or two treatments with two ounces of lye to the gallon without the salt. It is necessary to draw off the solution, rinse well, and put on fresh solution several times during the process to get the best results.

Seedling Olives Must Be Grafted.

Will olive trees grown from the olive seed be the right thing to plant?
Will they be true to the parent tree or will they have to be grafted?

Olives which a seedling olive tree will bear will be, as a rule, very inferior and generally of the type of the wild olive. All such trees must be grafted in order to produce any particular variety which you desire.

Olives, Oranges and Peppers.

We have been told that olive trees easily become infested with a fungus disease which they then impart to the orange tree. The same objection is raised to the planting of pepper trees. May this be true in some parts of the State and not in others?

The fungus of which you have heard is the "black smut." It is a result, not a cause. It grows on the honey dew exuded from scale insects and if your trees have no scale they have no fungus. The olive trees and pepper trees may communicate this trouble to citrus trees, or vice versa - whichever gets it first gives it away to the other. If you will work hard enough to kill the scale wherever it appears you can have all these trees, but, of course, it costs a lot to fight scale on big pepper trees, and it is, therefore, wisest usually to choose an ornamental tree not likely to accept the scale.