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This will sound like bullshit... but I have three indoor olives at the moment. Two were ordered as rooted cuttings a couple months back, under grow lights and g

This will sound like bullshit... but I have three indoor olives at the moment. Two were ordered as rooted cuttings a couple months back, under grow lights and getting a decent amount of new growth. A third was on the clearance rack at Lowes, it's a big bigger. But, before they get 3ft or so, they're going to have to go outside. They're already too big for my not-unimpressive grow lights. Olive oil's already like $50 for a gallon can (and not much cheaper even if you eat the trash stuff). Were olive orchards inside, no one like you or me would ever get to enjoy them again.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
Trim them into bonsai.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  I've never been good at that. Knowing exactly how much to trim, and when, is some sort of psychic power. My plant telepathy's just weak. That said, olives would probably work well for it, considering their growth habit. Only as art, mind you, my wife and I'd fight over the one olive per year for the celebratory dinner salad.
  - Maciek416 2y ago
    I've studied bonsai with a professional who trained in Japan for a number of years. Bonsai is a well-developed professional craft that should be learned from people who already know it rather than guessed at from absolute first principles (or from completely illiterate/nonsensical web slop, whether AI or not), as most beginners unfortunately try to do. The known-good techniques that produced long-term bonsai don't in any way whatsoever resemble the naive approach of "trimming" in the hedge pruning sense. This (along with the mistake of growing indoors) is why the vast majority of the public concludes bonsai is a dark art / impossible. Guessing at bonsai is like throwing rocks at a computer hoping that C code will just "happen" somehow. If you have a sun-facing outdoor garden, know what the term "binary tree" means, and can describe a tree in terms of a data structure (nodes etc), then you have within you the ability to learn bonsai for realsies if you make contact with people who do it in real life. Olive bonsai trees are relatively common in mediterranean-climate bonsai scenes, like that of California's bonsai scene: https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-restyling/ https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-... Trees like this are not grown on kitchen counters or in living rooms. _Maybe_ in a world-beating cannabis tent, but the hassle is extreme, and (going back to the topic of this thread), fighting diseases in the indoor cultivation environment is much much harder than outside.
  - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    If all you want is the fruit you don't have to be artistically inclined. You can keep it simple and space-saving by training them into miniature espalier.
jnmandal 2y ago
Nailed it. Indoor farming doesn't work at scale for tree crops. The soviets had quasi indoor "pineapple pit" style plantations of citruses in far north of their effective ranges. Imagine something like a subterranean greenhouse in trench format -- yet even in a planned economy that was hardly a viable project. But the Spanish monks who gave gave California olive trees were on to something. If you plant enough new olives from seed then you can eventually find and develop a variety that grows well in your particular climate. This obviates the need for sheltering the tree much or at all. No offense mate but I bet if we accounted for the cost of your grow light setup your eventual harvest might could be some of the most expensive olives in the world. No hate though, I've got an olive tree indoors too (though just in a window).
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  >If you plant enough new olives from seed then you can eventually find and develop a variety that grows well in your particular climate. Yeh, "Mission" olives. One of the cuttings is that. Allegedly one of the most cold-hardy cultivars. It might survive outside with our winters (yay global warming) if I get the trunk to about 4" before it has to make its own way outdoors. Hoping anyway. >No offense mate but I bet if we accounted for the cost of your grow light setup your eventual harvest might could be some of the most expensive olives in the world. Oh, for sure. These are my end-of-the-world olive trees. Mostly keeping them inside now because it's winter. Starting in March, they should be able to go outside until Halloween or so. I should be able to get more cuttings off of each (Mission, Pendolino, Arbequina), and make several dozen trees. But some will always be indoors as mother trees for more cuttings. And yeh pineapples are absurd. But my daughter just finally nailed getting the tops to root... putting them in a jar of water just rots the crown here (air quality, humidity? dunno). She dried one out until it looked dead, then trimmed the bottom a bit more, and there was nice living tissue, a pretty yellow. That was able to be put to moisture, and it rooted in a few weeks. The greenhouse square footage for something like "one pineapple a month" would be on the order of 350sqft, and we're unclear if they can be staggered. Sometimes these plants decide to all bloom at once, even if some are overdue and others premature. We have a list of "things we can't live without if the rest of you monkeys shit the bed and and can't sell it to us anymore". If anyone knows anybody at Foundation Plant Services at UCB and would like to do me a favor, private message me? Just need someone to put in a word for me.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago

Trim them into bonsai.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
I've never been good at that. Knowing exactly how much to trim, and when, is some sort of psychic power. My plant telepathy's just weak. That said, olives would probably work well for it, considering their growth habit. Only as art, mind you, my wife and I'd fight over the one olive per year for the celebratory dinner salad.
- Maciek416 2y ago
  I've studied bonsai with a professional who trained in Japan for a number of years. Bonsai is a well-developed professional craft that should be learned from people who already know it rather than guessed at from absolute first principles (or from completely illiterate/nonsensical web slop, whether AI or not), as most beginners unfortunately try to do. The known-good techniques that produced long-term bonsai don't in any way whatsoever resemble the naive approach of "trimming" in the hedge pruning sense. This (along with the mistake of growing indoors) is why the vast majority of the public concludes bonsai is a dark art / impossible. Guessing at bonsai is like throwing rocks at a computer hoping that C code will just "happen" somehow. If you have a sun-facing outdoor garden, know what the term "binary tree" means, and can describe a tree in terms of a data structure (nodes etc), then you have within you the ability to learn bonsai for realsies if you make contact with people who do it in real life. Olive bonsai trees are relatively common in mediterranean-climate bonsai scenes, like that of California's bonsai scene: https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-restyling/ https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-... Trees like this are not grown on kitchen counters or in living rooms. _Maybe_ in a world-beating cannabis tent, but the hassle is extreme, and (going back to the topic of this thread), fighting diseases in the indoor cultivation environment is much much harder than outside.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  If all you want is the fruit you don't have to be artistically inclined. You can keep it simple and space-saving by training them into miniature espalier.

jnmandal 2y ago

Nailed it. Indoor farming doesn't work at scale for tree crops. The soviets had quasi indoor "pineapple pit" style plantations of citruses in far north of their effective ranges. Imagine something like a subterranean greenhouse in trench format -- yet even in a planned economy that was hardly a viable project. But the Spanish monks who gave gave California olive trees were on to something. If you plant enough new olives from seed then you can eventually find and develop a variety that grows well in your particular climate. This obviates the need for sheltering the tree much or at all. No offense mate but I bet if we accounted for the cost of your grow light setup your eventual harvest might could be some of the most expensive olives in the world. No hate though, I've got an olive tree indoors too (though just in a window).

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
>If you plant enough new olives from seed then you can eventually find and develop a variety that grows well in your particular climate. Yeh, "Mission" olives. One of the cuttings is that. Allegedly one of the most cold-hardy cultivars. It might survive outside with our winters (yay global warming) if I get the trunk to about 4" before it has to make its own way outdoors. Hoping anyway. >No offense mate but I bet if we accounted for the cost of your grow light setup your eventual harvest might could be some of the most expensive olives in the world. Oh, for sure. These are my end-of-the-world olive trees. Mostly keeping them inside now because it's winter. Starting in March, they should be able to go outside until Halloween or so. I should be able to get more cuttings off of each (Mission, Pendolino, Arbequina), and make several dozen trees. But some will always be indoors as mother trees for more cuttings. And yeh pineapples are absurd. But my daughter just finally nailed getting the tops to root... putting them in a jar of water just rots the crown here (air quality, humidity? dunno). She dried one out until it looked dead, then trimmed the bottom a bit more, and there was nice living tissue, a pretty yellow. That was able to be put to moisture, and it rooted in a few weeks. The greenhouse square footage for something like "one pineapple a month" would be on the order of 350sqft, and we're unclear if they can be staggered. Sometimes these plants decide to all bloom at once, even if some are overdue and others premature. We have a list of "things we can't live without if the rest of you monkeys shit the bed and and can't sell it to us anymore". If anyone knows anybody at Foundation Plant Services at UCB and would like to do me a favor, private message me? Just need someone to put in a word for me.