16 



THE OLIVE 



oil per tree, and hope for as much more as we please. Also olive 

 culture in Spain is susceptible of improvement. The yield could 

 be much increased by giving more care and attention to the or- 

 chards. Their methods are very crude and the jDeople very poor. 

 But their large experience has demonstrated the futility of planting 

 too near together. This is the crying sin of the California fruit 

 grower. In this way heretofore unheard of pests are evolved, trees 

 are rendered sickly and stunted, and promising orchards become 

 unprofitable. The olive is least able to bear the effects of over-, 

 crowding; sunlight and ventilation are absolute necessities to it. 

 Fifty good trees to an acre is a better investment than a hundred 

 r)Oor ones. As the olive is so long in maturing, it is customary to 

 utilize the space between the young trees by growing grapes and 

 the short lived fruits, such as prunes and peaches, to give way 

 finally to the mature tree. 



On purchasing the Quito Farm the trees were found to be injur- 

 ing each other by their proximity, (sixteen and one half feet) and 

 every other one was taken out, deprived of all its branches and re- 

 planted. This was done in the spring of 1883. Those replanted 

 trees will this year bear a crop : that is they have been lost to the 

 orchard for the past five years, owing to the error of their having 

 been planted too near together in the first place. This year 

 the trees, by reason of their increased growth, are still too near 

 together, and. the process of thinning out will have to be repeated. 

 In this case the economy of planting the trees a reasonable distance 

 apart in the first instance is quite evident. 



Mr. Ellwood Cooper has told us that the best result he ever ob- 

 tained was one bottle of oil from ten pounds and. fifty-six hun- 

 dredths of olives, and the poorest a bottle from twelve and a half 

 pounds. This is twelve and ten per cent, respectively. The best 

 variety among the Mission, the Cornicabra, should give a better 

 result than this. The maximum yield of any olive is twenty per 

 cent, of oil for weight of berries. From that down to ten. An 



