Propagation Table Progress

Well, I'm halfway through the 2 month cycle to produce viable trees and let's just say it's been a fantastic learning experience.  About 2 weeks ago we had an afternoon power outage on a 110 degree day - that's about 43.3C for those of you stuck with a less precise temperature scale - that wreaked havoc on the perimeter plantings.  I'd estimate over half the cuttings were lost.

Other than the loss of mist for an afternoon there were several other negative factors that played in, operator error as they say in the military.  First, the bed is not in a greenhouse and only protected by shade cloth.  This exposes the cuttings to the drying effects of the wind.  Second, I did not initially compensate the misting schedule to account for the open air bed.  Misting times have been increased slightly and the pause between misting is now halved to around 7 minutes.  Thirdly, the cuttings were coming from water and nutrition stressed trees.  It's very sad to look at the now decimated bed.

The good news is all the above problems are being addressed so that the next round of cuttings late August will hopefully fare better.  Also after pulling several cuttings from the center of the bed, roots are forming!  There is hope yet.

Trash Patrol

I hate leaving clutter behind in the grove.  Especially all that green orchard tape.  It goes in my pocket and can add up fast in a new grove while training trees.  Here's a sample collected from just one row.

Olive Tissue Analysis

Dropped  5 samples of leaves off at a local agricultural lab for nutritional analysis.  The results of this lab will help us focus our ongoing fertilization program to give the trees just what they need and no more.  This is an important part of sustainable farming.  We want just enough nutrients, especially Nitrogen, for the tree, but not so much that we have excess running into our local watershed harming the environment.

For the samples I simply took brown paper lunch bags and pulled 40-100 leaves from a single cultivar and labeled the bag accordingly, so at the end I had one labeled bag per cultivar I wanted sampled.  The leaves wanted, I learned from the nice folks at Sunland Analytical, are a selection on the top 1/3 -2/3 of the tree from East to West, basically as the Sun traverses the tree.  This provides a good sampling of the tree from those leaves that are fully sun exposed to those leaves that are more shaded.  I took a random sampling of healthy trees throughout our fields.      

As you may know, an olive tree will have alternating heavy crop and light crop years.  What growth you have this Summer will help decide what yield you will realize come harvest 18 months away.  This years harvest has already been decided by the tree.  So our fertilization program this Summer is actually for next years harvest.  Come next Spring we want a good number of buds to decide that they have enough stores of nutrition to dedicate themselves to fruit production.  If we haven't provided that nutrition this year, a low production year will result because the tree feels starved and will dedicate itself to storing nutrition in the form of new growth.

Custom Wood John Deere Grill

    So after mulching the original grill I had to come up with a replacement.  After a few calls and trips to the parts store I came to the sad conclusion that a $550 dollar replacement was not an option.  So after a few hours, some scrap wood, paint, and wire screen, behold:

 The Frame

Bling baby!

    John Deere utility with Mercedes luxury.

Irrigation Timer

Finally added an irrigation timer to blocks 1 and 2.  Too bad I can't run it until I replace a leaking controller.

July 16 Olive Lignification

Favalosa at 9mmx16mm
Maurino at 9mmx14mm
Today was the first resistance encountered while splitting an olive.

 Maurino on the right.

 Favolosa lignification

Maurino lignification

I just like writing lignification.

Olive progression 2013

Below are two olives, to the left a Maurino and to its right a Favolosa.  Notice the Favolosa's darker green color compared to the Maurino.

 Below is a cross section of the Favolosa, around 11mm.

 Below is a Maurino, around 10mm.

Notice the endocarp is defined, as it has been for several weeks, and is not yet hardening, or lignifying.  In the center where the kernal or seed will be is occupied by a jelly like fluid.

Olive Irrigation Formula for drip lines

Okay, here's what I'm doing.  The state of California has weather stations which calculate the daily evapotranspiration (ET) of a known water intensive crop, in the case of our local station in Diamond Springs, a cover of grass is monitored (ETo).  Each day a number for ETo is given which represents the water losses for that grass.  Yesterdays was .31 inch.  That is the amount of water required by that  crop for the conditions present such as temperature, wind, cloud cover, etc, which need to be replaced.  To convert the number to the amount an olive tree uses I need a conversion factor.  This is published and remains constant during certain yearly growth stages.  The number is .75 and is represented by (Kc).  Meaning an olive tree requires 75% of the water that the grass (ETo) does.  This new number is the ETc for olives.

I also need to take into account the size of the tree.  Basically I find the diameter of the tree canopy, square it and multiply it by conversion factor of .7854 to get the area (A).  For example our trees are averaging about a 4' diameter, so 4(4).7854 = 12.6 sq. feet

Also since the formula I use needs to reconcile the Area and ETc  (ETc = ETo X Kc) which is given in inches to gallons, I use a conversion factor of .623

The formula is as follows:

Gallons/tree/day =  ETo(Kc)A(.623) / .9

The .9 is the efficiency of the water delivered via drip lines.  It is the most efficient value for any water delivery system.

So to water I do the following: 

                                       .31(.75)12.6(.623) / .9  =  2gallons/tree/day

 So every tree, were it fully grown at this size, requires 2 gallons.  Since these trees are still small they will require ~30% more water to make up for loss of shade and wind protection afforded by larger trees, and to make up for my poor weed control.  That bumps me up to around 3 gallons a day.  

I water every other day in the Summer which comes out to around 6 gallons.  Since I have two 1 gallon/hr emitters a tree, I simply divide the total gallons needed by 2 to get my run times required to keep healthy growing trees.  

We'll talk about a controlled defict for for fine olive oil production later.  Right now these trees are new and I want them growing.

Keep in mind this is a basic formula and their are many other ways to take into account a plethora of variables to further fine tune your irrigation needs.

Resources

Californis Irrigation Management Information System (CIMIS)

Mike Terrell, WSU, Master Gardeners

Drip Irrigation Formula

Olive Irrigation and problems