Prune Olive – After Harvest, Open Center

Prune olive after harvest, or in late winter, to open the center and to keep fruit wood in the sun.

Prune after harvest, and keep the center open

olive bears on last year’s shoots, and it never bears twice on the same spot of wood. Open the center so sun reaches the outer shell of twigs, and take out suckers from the roots. [1] A few well-placed thinning cuts beat a hundred tips. Heading the top forces a flush of upright shoots, and the tree climbs out of reach again. [2] A landscape tree can keep a central leader if you do not want fruit. A fruiting tree is easier to pick as a vase.

How to prune an olive tree

Start with dead wood and suckers, then open the middle.

1. Cut out dead, crossing, and broken wood. Pull or cut suckers at the roots and water sprouts in the interior.
2. Choose three to five well-spaced limbs along the trunk, starting about 18 to 30 inches up, and remove the extras that crowd them.
3. Take out whole shoots that shade the center, cutting back to a limb, not to a stub of short tips.
4. Lower a tree that has gotten too tall by taking a tall limb back to a lower side shoot, not by topping the whole canopy at once.

What fails if you cut a young tree hard

For the first few years, take almost no wood off the upper canopy. Hard cutting delays the first crop. Remove only badly placed limbs and suckers until the frame is set. [3] An old, neglected tree can be brought down over two or three years, taking about a third of the crowded wood each time, with the big cuts low enough that new growth starts where you can reach it. [4]

Open the center after harvest, take whole shoots instead of topping, and leave a young tree almost uncut until the frame is set.