CALIFORNIA OLIVE CULTURE UNFRUITFULNESS. 25 



* U A popular idea is, that if land is not fit for anything else 

 it will do for olives. I do not think so. They have a saying 

 in Italy, 'No manure, no oil.' The reason why we do not get 

 olives is, the trees are starved, if want of water can be called 

 starvation. For lack of water the soil cannot furnish the 

 material from which the olive is made. I have seen trees 

 which were able to and did bear fifteen gallons of fine fruit, 

 while fifty feet from them there were other olive trees, of the 

 same size and age, and which bloomed quite as profusely, and 

 in which every physical and natural condition was the same, 

 that did not produce fifteen quarts, I might say, fifteen pints, 

 of olives. Cause, starvation; and I have no doubt, if they 

 had had a proper quantity of water, at the proper time, as the 

 others had, they would have produced as much fruit as the 

 others did. Irrigation without cultivation is quite as unsatis- 

 factory in results as no irrigation. I saw an olive orchard 

 flooded with water; the land was not cultivated afterward, and 

 thus the water was carried off by evaporation, the earth becom- 

 ing baked and as hard as adobe bricks; result, in August the 

 olives shriveled until they were little larger than the pits 

 should have been, almost no pulp, so little in fact that 188' 

 pounds of fruit were required for a gallon of oil. I do not 

 know of any soil that would not produce a good olive if it had 

 a sufficient quantity of water. This is a solution of the whole 

 question. With facilities for proper irrigation, I would not 

 hesitate to plant any ordinary soil with olive trees, and would 

 expect as a result as many olives as the tree should bear. 

 Nor must it ; be forgotten that good drainage is quite as 

 important as irrigation. They go 'hand in hand.' " 



UNFRUITFULNESS OF THE OLIVE. 



The question of the unproductiveness of the olive tree in cer- 

 tain localities is at present agitating the minds of many growers 

 throughout the State; several orchards, although old enough 

 to bear, not yet having given remunerative returns, and others 



* Hon. Frank A. Kimball, in Report of Third Olive-Growers' Convention 

 (1893), p. 29. 



