The Importance of a Good Pruning
Pruning our olive trees is a crucial part of the annual calendar. The practice of selecting which branches will form the mature olive tree for generations to come truly is an art form. We like to prune from the very inception of a grove, to slowly craft its shape, working each year to slowly build towards perfection. Sometimes, however, we need to step into an older grove that’s long been neglected, and bring it back from the brink.
We are currently working on such a project, and are about 6 months in right now. The grove in question had been neglected for decades, and gotten grossly overgrown. The foliage was so dense and overwhelming that virtually no light was making it to anything but the very top canopy. While the area of the grove looked green from the outside, the trees were slowly dying, and had stopped producing olives years ago.
The pruning we advised was intensive, and visually speaking, looks quite extreme. Thirty foot tall olive trees were reduced to what almost looks like glorified stumps. But it is exactly what needed to be done. We left a solid core structure of major branches to form the future shape of healthy and productive trees. The roots, no longer overwhelmed with supporting loads of sun starved shrubbery can now direct their energy into fresh, healthy growth. Having all of the masses of trimmed off portions shredded into wood chips is an added bonus, giving the grove a nice layer of fresh mulch.
You can see that 6 months after the hard prune, we are back in the same large grove of Mission olive trees that we pruned in the spring. Looking at the trees now, bursting with new growth, we see that not only are they alive and well, but they are coming back with vigor. Some trees may look a little chaotic at the moment, but later this year we’ll do a quick cleanup pruning, to eliminate suckers and clear out the interiors of the trees. The large trunks and significant architecture of the olive trees is a great asset, and will make for a magnificent grove once they’re properly shaped.
