Of course, you can simply go to a garden center or hardware store and buy an olive tree of the “Olea europaea” variety there - or you can enjoy growing such a tree yourself. We'll show you how it works!
How to grow an olive tree from seeds?
To grow an olive tree from seed, you need ripe, unprocessed olives. Carefully remove the pulp from the seed core, wash it and let it soak in water for 24 hours. Then plant the core 1 cm deep in potting soil.
Olives are stone fruits
Just like plums, cherries, peaches and nectarines, the olive is also a stone fruit. Drupes typically contain a hard, highly woody seed core surrounded by soft pulp. Such fruits are usually eaten by birds or other animals, although the seeds are usually also swallowed and excreted elsewhere. In this way, the drupe-bearing trees or bushes multiply, which of course also applies to the olive.
Seed selection
Getting suitable seeds is not that easy with olives. Olives with pits are certainly available in German supermarkets, but almost exclusively in processed form. However, the seeds of pickled or otherwise processed olives are no longer able to germinate. But even fresh olives, which are sometimes available in Italian or Turkish speci alty shops, are only suitable for growing olives to a limited extent - they are usually green, i.e. unripe and therefore not yet capable of germinating.
What must suitable olives be like?
Seed kernels suitable for growing young olives have the following properties:
- they are ripe, i.e. H. have the darkest and softest possible flesh
- the riper the better
- they are not processed, but fresh
- the fresher, the better
- neither the olive nor the pit should show any damage (e.g. cracked areas)
However, such olives are hard to come by in Germany, which is why you only have these options:
- Harvest from your own tree
- Bring seeds from vacation
- Buy seeds in specialist stores
Preparing the seed for planting
However, before planting, you should prepare the seed accordingly, i.e. H. You should carefully remove the surrounding pulp from the seed core - but be careful not to injure the core in the process. Gently wash the seed under warm running water, rubbing off any remaining pulp. Then let the core soak in room temperature water for 24 hours (changing the water more often) - this is especially true for purchased ones, i.e. H. dried seeds. Now you can place the core with the tip upwards in potting soil about a centimeter deep.
Tips & Tricks
Olive trees grown from seeds are generally not noble olives, but belong to the wild olive genus. Once your tree is a little older, you could use it as a base for a noble olive. To do this, however, you would need a corresponding cutting that you can bring with you from vacation.