Olive trees in the Pacific Northwest - advice???

[tarnado]

Crossposted from another forum because I got zero responses!

Okay so I was considering growing a couple of olive trees here in Seattle. Before you laugh (or when you have finished), our family has friends in a town to the north, right on the water in a much cooler area, that have a young olive tree that has ripened olives. It's probably Arbequina, I think.

Where we live, we have a south-facing heat trap that really collects a lot of dry summer heat.

SO I happened across some new olive cultivars sourced from the Nikita Botanical Garden, in Crimea, Ukraine: "Star of Crimea" and "Black Pearl." I compared the climate data for Sevastopol and Seattle, knowing that the Seattle data are collected at the international airport (which is closer to the moderating influence of the Puget Sound), and felt like "hey! this might just work!" The generalized climate data show Sevastopol to be just a bit warmer than Seattle, with higher 'low' temps in the summer, but Seattle warmer than Sevastopol in the winter. Okay! Great!

Turns out, I should have compared the climate data for Yalta, rather than Sevastopol, which is much more protected by the Crimean Mountains and has a more southerly aspect walling in heat. The difference is about +3 degrees F. This difference is most pronounced in the climate data as summer nighttime 'low' temperatures.

Is this project doomed (and I am not referring to my marriage: my spouse has specifically forbidden buying new "seeds" but nothing about more "trees" so I am clearly perfectly in the clear here)? Does anyone else have either experience with growing olives in the Puget Sound region and/or with these new-ish (to the US) olive cultivars from Ukraine? I would really love to hear about it!

Added: photo of Ukraine's national olive tree champion, from the Nikita Botanical Garden. Source: https://www.monumentaltrees.com/en/photos/8182/

ukraineolive.jpg (380.29 KiB) Viewed 675 times

[greenfig]

A nice idea but it might be tough to implement.
Olive trees like dry climate, you are a bit on a very wet side

I am curious, why do you want them to produce? I live next to a dozen large olives that produce a godly amount of the messiest fruit I’ve ever seen and unfortunately of a lesser quality. People tried to make oil out of them and the cheapest from TJ was better, and that’s in Southern California!

It takes a while before they start producing and you don’t know the quantity of them ahead of time.

Just my 2 cents .
Good luck!

[tarnado]

Bwahahaha because, as mountain-climbers say, it is there!

Honestly, I like how olive trees look, how they smell, and even how they sound. Making fruit would be a bonus, and a challenge that I want to try out. I'm not particularly fond of olives for eating, but I do consume a lot of the oil. It would be a really fun, long-term, interesting project.

[pombazaar]

This year I was given two olive cultivars that originated from Nikitsky Botanical Garden, both said to be very cold hardy. I tried rooting almost 2 dozen of these and every attempt failed. Unlike fig and pomegranate cuttings that you can root in a cup outside in the spring with almost 100% success, the olives all slowly rotted from the bottom up. And when I say slowly I mean 6+ months where top growth was clearly alive but not a single root formed.

I've also attempted growing Amphissis and Saracena. These grew over 4 feet in a container during their first and only season. I brought them inside mid November and they all died within a month or two. I think the shock was just too much. It was a sad loss because they were really pretty trees. What was even more sad is that they had began producing flowers that same year during the summer. Another year or so and I may have seen fruit.

I think sustaining to the point of fruit production in your region is possible but will be difficult.

[tarnado]

Thanks for the advice and the responses. When pomegranate people *and* fig people all think you might be crazy, perhaps it is time to hang up the trowel.

OR NOT

I succumbed and ordered two trees anyway just about the moment I posted the topic, oy

[tarnado]

So Frank Nicholas Meyer (born as Frans Nicolaas Meijer), plant explorer extraordinaire, introducer of the 'Meyer lemon,' and general botanist citizen of the world, went on a plant exploration trip to eastern Asia via Europe from 1908 to 1912 (!). During that trip, Meyer sent several cuttings of olives to the United States from the Russian Empire - at least 11 accessions were able to be propagated. All were selected due to the experience of cold that the area was known to experience. The accession notes state that the olives survived temperatures down to -2 degrees F (note: the temperature in degrees R refers to the Réaumur scale, used in the 19th century in Europe and into the 20th century in Russia, where water freezes at zero and boils at 80 degrees).

In the original accession notes from 1910:

OLEA. 26801. From Nikita, Crimea, Russia. Cuttings from a
very large olive tree several centuries old, growing in the
Imperial Botanical Garden at Nikita and bearing large fruits.
This and the following numbers (26802-811) are cuttings of
olive trees that have withstood temperatures of 15° below
zero R (2° below zero F) unhurt when other olives were
frozen to the ground. They can therefore be recommended for
South Texas and the interior valleys of California where
there are heavy frosts occasionally. 26802-811.
The same remarks apply to these as to the preceding numbers
except that they were cut from trees between 60 and 70 years
of age. Each number is a different variety but they have
not been named by the Russians. (Meyer's introductions.)

These accessions are historical records now and are unavailable - unless some maniac has a collection of them somewhere!

[pombazaar]

I was re-reading through this post and remember reading on some newer cultivars from Ukraine that may interest you. These may be some accessions to consider and are said to be cold resistant.

DOLE 182 / Nikitskaya #1 - Per Bellini et al, this is a local cultivar from Crimea. It is part of a breeding program in the Ukraine that aims to obtain new cold resistant cultivars.

DOLE 183 / Nikitskaya Krupnoplodnaya - Per Bellini et al, this is a local cultivar from Crimea. It is part of a breeding program in the Ukraine that aims to obtain new cold resistant cultivars.

[tarnado]

Thanks for thinking of me and this matter!

When you say 'newer cultivars from Ukraine' - does that mean they are here, as germplasm, in the United States? My Russian is terrible and my Ukrainian language skills are non-existant, so ...

[pombazaar]

I'm pretty sure these are 90s era but new in the sense compared to OLEA 26801-26811. DOLE 182 and DOLE 183 are both in the UCD repository.