Of course, you can simply go to a garden center or hardware store and buy an "Olea europaea" olive tree there - or you can enjoy growing one yourself. We show you how it works!
Olives are stone fruits
Just like plums, cherries, peaches or nectarines, the olive is one of the types of stone fruit. Drupes typically contain a hard, heavily woody seed core surrounded by soft flesh. Such fruits are usually eaten by birds or other animals, with the seeds usually also being swallowed and excreted at another location. In this way, the drupe-bearing trees or shrubs multiply, which of course also applies to the olive.
Selection of the seed
Getting the right seeds is not that easy with olives. Olives with a core are certainly available in German supermarkets, but almost exclusively in processed form. However, the seeds of pickled or otherwise processed olives are no longer viable. But even fresh olives, which are sometimes available from Italian or Turkish specialty shops, are only suitable for olive cultivation to a limited extent - they are usually green, i.e. unripe and therefore not yet germinable.
How must suitable olives be designed?
Seeds suitable for growing young olives have the following properties:
- they are ripe, d. H. have the darkest and softest possible flesh
- the more mature the better
- they are not processed but fresh
- the fresher the better
- Neither the olive nor the core may show any damage (e.g. burst areas)
However, such olives are hardly available in Germany, which is why you only have these options:
- Harvest from your own tree
- Bring seeds back from vacation
- Buy seeds in specialist shops
Preparing the seed for planting
However, before planting, you should prepare the seed accordingly, i.e. H. You should carefully remove the pulp from the seed core - but be careful not to damage the core. Gently wash the seed under warm running water, rubbing off the remaining pulp. Then let the core soak in room-warm water for 24 hours (changing the water more often) - this applies especially to store-bought, i. H. dried seeds. Now you can put the core with the tip upwards about one centimeter deep in the potting soil.
tips and tricks
Olive trees grown from seeds are usually not noble olives, but belong to the genus of wild olives. As soon as your tree is a little older, you could use it as a base for a noble olive. For this, however, you would need a suitable cutting that you can bring with you from your vacation.