Oregon Olive Trees™

Oregon Olives 

Think global - buy local.

Oregon Olives

Oregon Olive Oil

Oregon Olive Trees

Trees for Sale

Introduction

Planting

Growing

Cultivars

Land Preparation

 

Overview  One can do a lot or a little in the way of land preparation for planting olive trees.  This pictorial assumes you want to do a professional job - say just about the exact equivalent of what an estate wine grape grower does.  In fact, all of these pictures are of a new vineyard going in (with the exception of the liming of Kathy's Grove).

 

09/17/08  So, say you start with some land.  A bit overgrown, perhaps, but with potential…  In the foreground is Kathy's Grove; the background property will be sold to the man who owns the 15 acre estate vineyard directly below both properties.  It is currently covered with old english walnuts and filberts, with a lot of blackberry, poison oak and scottish broom maquis mixed in for good measure.

10/10/09  The vineyard guy now owns the land, now's The Time for Change!  First thing, remove -all- above ground vegetation, taking as many of the roots with you as you can.  That's me on my orange Kubota in the lower left, lightly rototilling in the fall cover crop.

10/22/09  And burn it.  Spread some ryegrass and crimson clover seeds, and let it go at that for the winter.

Spread lime and fertilizer  Get a soil test done, and decide on how much money you want to spend!  Although olives will tolerate a wide range of pH and poor soil, like any other crop they will do better and produce more given extra nutrients.  Enough to pay for the nutrients?  Well, that is why you get to decide whether or not it is worth it to you!  Lime being spread on Kathy's Grove: since we have acidic soil I put a lot of lime down by local standards (4 tons an acre), in fact the lime people had never done so much to a piece of land before.  But the best time to get heavy equipment onto a small piece of land is when nothing else is there, and believe it or not my fertilizer recommendation was for 6 tons of lime per acre!

08/03/10  The core land preparation is best done in the driest part of the year (August here), for several reasons.  A major point of land preparation is to add airspace to the soil without ruining soil structure; you don't want to run all this heavy equipment around on wet soil!

 

Disc it first.  Disc it only a little - lots more work will be done to break up the dirt clods!

08/06/10  Also, the idea of deep ripping is to fracture the soil: wet soil doesn’t fracture.

 

Here is some interesting trivia: the largest tractor ever built was for two brothers who were farming cotton down in California near where I grew up.  It was specifically purpose designed for deep ripping, weighting in at 100,000 pounds and carrying 1000 gallons of diesel fuel.

 

You must rip it!  Rip it good!  (Remember "The Devos"?)

08/07/10  Lots of roots, a fair amount of rock.  Burn the roots, truck the rock somewhere else...

08/07/10  Git your Heavy Harrow™ out thar… you have one dontcha?

08/09/10  And amidst all this is a guy on a "normal" utility tractor with a light harrow running around gathering up roots (and dead gophers for all I know).

08/29/10  Whew!  Finally, everything is done.  Here is a shot looking across the grape trellis supports.  Of course, real olive growers don't use trellis support (grin).  Interestingly, although you can see the wands marking the grape positions, they will not be planted until next spring.  Another cover crop of ryegrass is planted to prevent winter erosion.

01/19/11  I never saw them laying down the herbicide to form the rows and alleys, this could be either pre-emergent or post emergent herbicide.  Note the green shaggy grass in the upper left of the picture is where the burn pile was.  Also, note the gophers are re-colonizing the land from around the periphery.

So there you have it.  At the high end, this is how they do it, even for a little four acre vineyard addition.  I must admit to loving to drive a tractor, so I decided to do all my land development work myself (plus I just couldn't afford to pay for the kind of professional development you see above).  So, with a 34 HP Kubota tractor with front end loader, 14" single bottom plow, root ripper, rototiller, box scraper, rock rake and spin spreader; I did the equivalent of what is shown above.  The main difference?  While they are able to get down three good feet with their ripper, I doubt I did much better than a foot with mine.  Will that make much of a difference, seeing as I am planting olives rather than grapes?  I don't think so, seeing as how olives have shallow spreading roots.  On the other hand, if I ever win the lottery and the vineyard featured above ever comes up for sale, I think it safe to say I'd love to see how olives would do on that parcel…

 

My rock pile, 09/16/07: