Kitchen Garden Forum

There have been a few programmes recently mentioning growing olives for a crop in this country.

I would be very surprised if they could ripen any in our weather outdoors. They would have to have a very fast developing fruit from flowering to ripening and it would be interesting to see if there is such a cultivar, otherwise they would have to be sheltered enough for the trees to carry their fruits over winter to ripen up in spring.

I've had a small olive tree in a pot in the greenhouse for three years and this year harvested twelve fruits in April. It started flowering in May last year, and the fruits took until last month to ripen to a nice black.

I soaked them in brine to get rid of the bitterness, stoned them and gave them another soak in brine, rinsed them off and they tasted really good - nice and fruity. Not sure if that is how it should be done, but it worked.

I would like to hear other reports on growing olives as the articles i have read seem to involve an awful lot more "phaffing about" to get an edible crop.

I think even if you succeed in growing olives in this country, processing them isn't necessarily as easy as it sounds. A few years ago I bought some fresh olives on holiday in Portugal and bought them back here to try and process. I followed all the instructions, changing the brine regularly and ended up with them all going rotten. Never did discover what I'd done wrong but there's not much point in growing them unless you can process them as you can't eat them raw.

WestHamRon wrote:I would like to hear other reports on growing olives as the articles i have read seem to involve an awful lot more "phaffing about" to get an edible crop.

Well I can't answer about processing them, but we have an olive tree in our garden that started as a small plant and is currently around 10 feet high and it's got several olives on it at the moment.