Page:The Olive Its Culture in Theory and Practice.djvu/66

54 manure, is one of the causes of the plant becoming weak and sickly, and bearing heavily only at long intervals. To fertilize an olive tree well, it is sufficient to restore to the ground the refuse from the oil making and the ashes of the branches from pruning. The most valuable fertilizer, is the water pressed from the olive. It is heavily charged with vegetable matter, black in color, and should be collected in a vat at the time of oil making. To this should be added the pomace, after all the oil is extracted. To increase the quantity, and at the same time add to the richness of this manure, grind into the mass marine plants for their potash, or in the absence of these, ferns, rushes, cornstalks, wheat and barley, straw, dregs of pressed grapes, vine twigs, or broom corn. Good, but in a lesser degree, because poorer in mineral properties, are husks of decayed olives, scrapings from threshing floors and refuse of whatever nature. These ingredients are very advantageously mixed during fermentation. As each, or any of these materials are thrown in, add a laver of earth. Keep this receptacle covered till the rains are well over, and then let the summer sun have access to it and the fermentation be thorough. The water will now have precipitated all valuable matter, and if it exists in too great quantities, let some run off; but enough should always be left in the vat, to allow the mass to take up moisture in place of that which is given off in fermentation. Care should be taken to locate this putrifying mass at a distance to leeward of the dwellings, or sickness might easily result from it. By September it can be cut out with a spade, like peat, and will make the very best of fertilizers for the olive orchard. But this is a powerful agent and should never be applied to the trees until thoroughly fermented in the manner described. If used as manure without fermentation, or mixing with other ingredients, the result would be the roots would be burned and the trees killed. The writer has seen the branches on young trees wither and die from coming in contact with pieces of sacking saturated with olive water and oil,