Grafting onto Olive trees

[Zenithtb]

Hiya!

I will hopefully soon be moving into a new house. It has a couple of orchard sized plots with olive trees in. I don't, however, want olive trees!

What I would like to do is graft other trees onto them. I presume I would cut the branches down and graft branches of other trees onto them?

The types of tree I would like would be
Pomegranete
Orange
Lemon
Almond
Apple
Pear
Plum
Apricot
etc. Basically anything but Olive! (I want the space, and there aren't enough to make oil from anyway!).

So, the question is, is this possible? With all of them? Any of them? None of them?

I have done an awful lot of web searching, and whilst there is a lot of information about grafting olive trees, I cannot find any about grafting anything else onto them So here I turn, as I know some other members here also have homes in Spain.

The obvious reason I wish to graft is because the olives are established with a good root system, and the soil here is not very good quality - a lot of clay and very stony. The house is up a mountain, btw, if that helps...

Sorry for the long question, but I hope you can see it's pretty specific and there is not a lot of information out there.

Zenithtb

[Nicos]

Gosh- that's an interesting idea!!!

( I'm absolutely no use to you though!!!!)

..should be interesting!!

[stella]

As I am desperate to get my olive trees to grow, all I can say is I am so envious......
Sorry not to be a help

[snohare]

I'm pretty sure that in order to graft successfully, you would need to use scions and cuttings from the same genus, which in this case would be Olea. Otherwise it would be like transfusing blood from a koala to a human...incompatible biochemistry and immune system rejection. To successfully match different species would be a one in a million longshot, I'd imagine. (Although I'm pretty sure Mother Nature has been known to manage it, she spends a bit more time and effort than you are likely to.)
That's why you don't get oranges grafted onto apple rootstocks, or pomegranates on olive trees...
As far as I know !!

[Nicos]

Can see where you're coming from with that snohare...and then I found this...(it's a bit heavy going in parts but it gives examples of what crosses used to be done... Olive onto a lot of others but nothing mentioned about something onto an oliv)....


Notes on Ancient Grafting ? TAPA 64:66?76 (1933)

May be there are some more modern, tolerant plants these days of course???

[snohare]

Wow, very interesting Nicos ! Of course many of the old Greek and other classical writers, even the more "reliable" ones like Aristotle, were notoriously gullible at believing what they read or were informed of by other sources. But it makes me wonder - especially given that I have read in modern arboriculture texts of natural crosses between entirely different species of trees - if perhaps the "can't graft" idea is a bit of an accepted myth of the modern era. It wouldn't be the first time a Victorian horticultural textbook said something widely believed even though it was hogwash. And medical science does this all the time !
Sorry this debate doesn't help you Zenithtb, but I'm awfully glad you did post about it. Maybe the best thing you can do is just try it...

[Zenithtb]

Well, as the next stage would be ripping up 20+ olive trees by their roots with a JCB, I gotta be honest, I'll try >anything< first!

If anyone comes up with anything I'd love to hear about - it would help me choose the scale of the experement

And thank you for that link Nicos - it does seem to give some hope, methinks!

[Nicos]

It would be a pity to rip them up

(The fields surrounding my house are full of apple orchards and spotty cows grazing beneath the mistletoed trees. That's part of the charm of this area.)

If you can't graft onto them-couldn't you use the land for something else and let the locals have the olives- I'm sure they'd be thrilled to take them off your hands for free- you'd get loads of brownie points

maybe clear a small area- there is only so much fruit/nuts you can eat unless you're intending to sell commercially???

[Zenithtb]

Well, the thing is although we'd have a lot of land, most of it would be taken up by the (very long) driveway, or is at 45 degrees (house is dug in on the side of a mountain). The area with the olives is the ONLY kinda flat land we'd have. I want a couple of most fruit trees and you very quickly get to 20-30 trees, so I need to get rid of the olives. Also I have no locals to impress as it's an off-the-grid house (no water, electricity, phone line etc), and the road near the house goes nowhere :->

Besides which, as we're in Spain we don't (normally!) get a lot of rain. [Unwanted] Olive trees sucking up the deep water and converting it into (useless) olives is too much, I'm afraid. As a grower myself (400+ seedlings growing ATM) I know what you're trying to say. But I want my plums, damnit :-) :-)

[Nicos]

.....Ha!!!!

[Liza]

Could you not sell them cheap or give them away and the buyer could dig them up for you !

Just a thought.

[Zenithtb]

Yeah - we were actually thinking about that. It's possible that one of the local garden centres would do that. For a much smaller tree it can be between 60-200€, and these are large well established Olives - prized in Spain...

Maybe they'd come 'n' dig 'em up and chuck me a couple of € as well... We can only ask and find out

Good suggestion!

[Liza]

My mum lives near Almeria she has 3 mature trees and pickles her olives, which is ok if you like them

Good luck whatever you decide to do !

[snohare]

Hey, you could do worse than contact direct some of the companies that sell old olive trees over here in the UK, and see if you can sell them your product. You may have to fork out more up front, but you might make more money...?
You have poor soil, a hot climate that is likely to get hotter, a dwindling water supply I would guess, and you are trying to grow trees that won't like any of these factors. I would suggest that half a loaf is better than none. Regardless of how much you want your plums, if you rip out your olives and stick in plants that are basically in the wrong place, it may be that all you will be doing is throwing away your half loaf. Don't be misled by your wishes into doing anything unsustainable. Granted, give it a try - but find the locals who have/had trees of the sort you want first, and if you can't find any - try small scale !
Please don't feel that I am trying to be discouraging here, zenithtb! You know the conditions better than I do, and if you have 400 + seedlings you are way ahead of my orchard - but you might want to consider this argument...
Typically within a grove of trees (any trees) in a hot climate, air temperature and humidity are respectively lower and higher due to the effects of transpiration from the leaves of the trees; this is a very powerful effect in creating a microclimate in which other plants can survive otherwise inhospitable conditions. Given all I have heard of salination/irrigation and air temperature problems, I would suggest that what you actually need is to leave a number of olive trees, as a siphon/pump for atmospheric moisture in hot weather.
If I was in your shoes, I would be considering taking out specific trees scattered around the grove and replacing them with more marginal fruit trees that would benefit from whatever moisture loss/shade/changes in soil temperature are coming from the olives. Granted, this is likely to be small, but it sounds like you need all the help you can get - if nothing else, you are going to have to find some good soil to put them into. Again, if possible (and I think we all know how likely this is, I'll bet you have heartbreaking stones !) before planting fruit or nut trees I'd dig out a deep deep hole and fill it with mulch-type, compostable vegetation, to encourage deep root growth and moisture absorption.You may find some good ideas from looking at permaculture literature and websites. The other thing I would consider is grafting different types of specialist, high value olives onto the existing trees, in order to gain income or increased yield.
My logic here comes from knowledge of research on microclimates and the effect of forests on weather systems, rather than being based on specific knowledge about fruit or nut growing, so you may find that there are factors that will disprove my logic (e.g. allelopathy). Here's hoping your climate is not as marginal as I am assuming...good luck !

[Zenithtb]

Sorry - going out to walk the doggies, but until I get back, you can see the location / climate here and here :-)

brb!