Journal January 20, 2014 - Cloning Arbequina

Of all of my olive trees, the Arbequina olive, shown above, deserves to be genetically duplicated.  This tree, although less than a foot tall, has flowers developing nearly every branch.  I doubt if every flower will set an olive, but even if a quarter of the flowers set, I fail to see how such a small tree will be able to support them.

The buds are starting to open and I am finding small patches of pollen on the leaves below the flowers.  When the flowers first open the stamens are closed, but open a short time later and apparently spew pollen out.  Using an artist's brush I am daubing the tip in the pollen clumps and transferring pollen from flower to flower like a bee.  That is probably not necessary, but I really want to see how productive this little tree can be, so I am taking no chances.

Today I removed two sections of growing tip, each about 2 inches long, surface sterilized them and placed them into culture.  As I wrote above, this little tree deserves having its superior genes replicated as many times as possible.