Ken’s Trees

Nothing Happening with European Olive Seeds

It has been just over one year and a month since I planted the European Olive seeds, and I’m starting to wonder if I will ever get anything to spring up here.  The description of the European Olive seeds that I recieved from the company that sold me the seeds (seedrack.com) said that it could take a full year for the seeds to germinate.  So it might be early to give up entirely on these guys, there really isn’t too much work to do on my part to keep them up.  The cover keeps everything pretty moist so I don’t even have to worry about water too often.  I’ll keep waiting…

I think we came up with a name for the dawn redwood above last night, tune in this weekend when I reveal it to the world wide interwebing.  In other news, the European Olive seeds are done with their scarification soak, and I planted all 25 this evening.  With some luck there will be an addition of a daily Olive tree photo in three months to the site.

My second set of seeds have finally arrived and I am wicked excited to add another type of tree to the site. This time I am trying to grow European Olive (olea europaea) bonsai trees, a different choice when considering typical bonsai. However, growing European Olive as bonsai is not as uncommon as one might think. Pictured on the left are the seeds next to a US dime as a size reference (the coin is 18 mm in diameter).

As I am preparing to grow these seeds I am realizing that my first selection of Dawn Redwood seeds was a very lucky choice. All that was required for the Dawn Redwood seeds was to sow them in soil, water, and wait less than two weeks. The European Olive seed has a much harder shell and requires a little more work to help improve success in germination, and a lot more time. In fact the instructions that were sent from Whatcom Seed Co. with the seeds say that germination may be delayed until next year, but most sources place it within three months. One trick to help the process is call scarification, this is making it easier for water to get into the center part of the seed. There are a couple of ways this can be done, the instructions that came with the seeds advised cracking the seed coat. To do this I tried using an exacto knife to slice a little into the seed, however I did not think this did too much and I found another suggestion to file the ends of the seeds. The next step in the scarification process is to soak the seeds in warm to hot water for 24 to 48 hours. This soaking is currently taking place overnight.

Hopefully everything works out and in about three months I will have another tree to add to the daily photo blog. I certainly won’t be posting three months of dirt photos (the site started this way to help get me into the habit of posting every day), but I will post a couple updates between now and then.