Olive trees bring many benefits to an Auckland garden; soft gray-green foliage, smooth gnarled trunks, salt and dry tolerance and an abundance of fruit.

POSITION:

Olives require full all day sun. Deep, rich soil will produce lush growth, but olives will also grow in shallow sandy or rocky soil. Good drainage is essential. Coastal areas are great for olives. Olives can serve multiple purposes; as a windbreaker, as an ornamental tree, and of course for their culinary fruit and oil. Olives display resilience to most garden pests and diseases and are also frost hardy.

FLOWERS AND FRUIT:

Fluffy white flowers are produced in early summer. Flowers are followed by green olives, which blacken and drop from the tree in late winter. Harvest your fruit when it is either green or black. Green olives are usually pickled. Black olives can be pickled or pressed for oil. See our pickling recipe for more information.

FEEDING:

When planting olives, add Kings 24 Plus slow release fertiliser. This will give your olives 2 years of feeding. Side dress with Kings Sheep Pellets and General Garden Fertiliser in Spring and Autumn to increase vigor and fruiting.

VARIETIES:

These are some of the varieties that are seasonally available at our Kings stores:

-Ascolano: fruit are large with a small pit. Good all content. Fruit is tender and must be handled carefully when harvesting. 8x7m.

Barnea: very high yielding, good oil content. Fruits small. A fast growing and bushy tree. 4.5x2.5m.

Manzanillo: spreading tree with larger fruit than Mission. Ripens early. Average oil content.

Mission: medium sized fruit, medium oil content.

J.5: heavy crops, large fruit. Selected from Northland. Great for NZ conditions. 5x5m.

Rakino: another NZ hybrid. Ideal for coastal conditions. Hardy upright growth, medium sized fruit.

Fantoio: small fruit, ripens late. Grows to approx 8m. Cold resistant.

PICKLING RECIPE:

Olives ripen from green to black, and either can be preserved. Green olives are usually pickled, whereas black olives are pressed for oil. Olives can be harvested for pickling as green fruit begin to get a purple tinge to them. Place a tarpaulin under mature trees, and hand pick or use a rake to pull fruit off. Place olives on a hard surface and bruise with a rolling pin, or prick with a fork. This allows salt and water to penetrate in the pickling process. Place olives in a bucket of water, and add 1/2 a cup of cooking or coarse salt per 10 cups of water. Keep the olives submerged by placing some kind of lid over them. Pour out the water each day and replace with fresh salted water. Repeat this process for 10-12 days until the olives no longer taste bitter. Measure the last volume of water that is poured off the olives. Place the drained olives into sterilized jars. Combine the same amount of water as that poured off the final soak, with one cup of salt per 10 cups of water. Boil this brine (without olives) then allow to cool. Pour the cooled salty brine over the olives in the sterilized jars. Seal the jars with a centimetre of olive oil. Preserved in this way, olives will keep for a year.

Before eating drain the brine off the olives. Fill the jar with cold water and soak olives in the refrigerator for 24 hours. If the olives are still too salty after this time, repeat the process until desirable taste is achieved. Add lemon, garlic, capsicum, basil, etc as desired.