Olives, in India, are only present in the form of bottled & pitted olives in brine solution. I felt it would nice and unique to have an olive plant growing in my apartment garden. So, I went online and ordered for Olive seeds on Ebay. 10 seeds for about $5. I got them in 3 weeks along with a free gift. I was excited looking at the seeds and immediately got one pot out and prepared it with some nice wet brown soil. I only had ten and I had never planted olives before, so not wanting to lose to experimentation, I planted only one. And waited, and waited, and waited as my excitement turned into anxiety and finally after 2 months I gave up. I dug out the seed to find out nothing had happened to it. It was just as I had left it except that it had become muddy. All along these 2 months, I was occasionally reading about growing olives from seed and realized they had a hard shell that needed to be scoured. However I had no idea how much I had to scour until I started out on it.
I took a fresh seed and started with a little saw I had lying around. I began carefully, trying not to damage the seed. Then I picked up speed and then some, until at one point I couldn’t believe how deep I had already gone. Some more scouring later, I was able to see that the shell was giving away to a hollow inside. I started scouring along the seed and finally pried it open. What I saw shocked me, for inside, lay a tiny cumin sized dark seed. Then I glanced at the shell and boy was that thick! It took me 20 minutes of careful sawing to get rid of it.
This is what I used to pry it open.
I have sowed it in a coconut shell containing a mix of mud and used-tea leaves. A great way to reuse those shells and it has a natural hole at the bottom for drainage! Tea is supposed to be an excellent fertilizer. So, I’m back to the waiting game now. I hope I have a beautiful olive plant in a few weeks from now! On a side note, I wonder how these seeds ever propagated through all these centuries with such hard shells? Maybe they just waited for the odd elephant or dinosaur to come along and crush the shell away!
