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Sunday, January 20, 2013

Flower Power!



It's that time of year again when your start counting your chooks before they hatch. Looking at all the thousands of little flower buds, one can't help but imagine a bumper crop. But as we know, only about 1 to 2% of all the flowers gets pollinated.  

Our two and three year old immature trees are probably not a good benchmark, but the flowers are very sporadic - especially on the Manzanillas. One out of every 10 trees have some flowers, while the single Koroneiki for instance is completely covered in flowers. Truth be told, if that hip-height tiny little tree ends up with fruit from only 1% of all the flowers, it will still look like a sad Goofy dragging its ears.


The mystery tree (the small one that was here when we arrived) was laden with flowers this year
after lots of its leaves blew off in spring. A fight for survival?

Beautiful little flowers just waiting to be pollinated.

Since I started this post about a month ago (the new veggie garden got in the way :)), tiny olives have started to form. And as expected, not nearly as many fruit as there were flowers. But that's okey. The trees are still babies and I don't expect anything at this stage. Besides, some terrible winds blew off many of the flowers as well as branches. I can only hope that the shelter belt will start doing it's thing in about 5 years or so.

That's the trouble when you start fresh with bare land. No quick fixes in terms of productive trees and shelter for small trees. Everything takes time, but I'm just very glad that trees seems to grow fairly fast in NZ! 

Small fruit developing. 










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