This article talks about how to reduce olive production in the low desert.
Full disclosure here: I’m an arborist, not a chemist, so this article may be light on multi-syllable words and heavy on “field knowledge.”
The first thing to talk about is the fact that olive trees must be diluted before spray application. Whenever we have sprayed Olives undiluted, the effectiveness of the application has been seriously compromised. The chemical just can’t get to all the flowers, and wherever the flowers survive the dew, there will eventually be olives. So thin the trees before you spray so you don’t have olive oil all over the sidewalk AND a bill for spraying them.
Once the trees clear, there is a choice of what chemicals to use. While there are others to choose from, like Florel, at Clean Cut we use Maintain almost exclusively, as we find it much more effective than other options. Maintain is a more powerful chemical and can usually get the job done with just one application. Being able to achieve our goal in an application equates to a lower cost to the customer, which naturally makes our customers happy. However, maintenance has a major drawback: it can cause trees to decline at a rapid rate, especially if applied incorrectly. Most of our customers are so fed up with olives in the ground that they no longer care about the overall health of the tree. Maintenance is also a strong chemical, so personal protective measures should be taken and the area kept free of children, pets, and other things that breathe for a period of time after spraying.
If you are okay with multiple chemical applications, there are a few other options you can consider. Embark and Olive Stop are generally better for the tree and also for people. These chemicals are less dangerous and of course not as effective as Maintain, but then it seems like everything is a trade-off in life. The other problem with these types of chemicals is the fact that they may need to be applied 2-3 times. Soon enough, the mathematics leans toward tree removal when calculating the cost of annual thinning and three-spray spraying of an olive tree. Most of our clients just prefer to Keep, but it’s nice to be aware of other options anyway.
The third option is to become an expert in curing olives and handing out jars of olives during the holidays. The olives curing process involves salt water to extract the bitterness and preserve the fruit. If I had unlimited free time on my hands, that’s what I would do. I only met one person who went to the trouble of curing their own olives and was quite impressed that someone could take a fruit that causes so much headache throughout the Valley and turn it into something as good as edible olives.