Page:The Olive Its Culture in Theory and Practice.djvu/18

16 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 orchards. Their methods are very crude and the people 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 overcrowding; sunlight and ventilation are absolute necessities to it. Fifty good trees to an acre is a better investment than a hundred poor 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 injuring each other by their proximity, (sixteen and one half feet) and every other one was taken out, deprived of all its branches and replanted. 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 obtained was one bottle of oil from ten pounds and fifty-six hundredths 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