By exposing the olives to the light and air, either during the salting or immediately after, ripe olives may be given a uniformly black color.  Also, fruit which is less ripe and which shows red and green patches after processing with lye, becomes an almost uniform dark brown color.  To do this, the olives are removed from the brine and exposed to light and air freely for one or two days.  Your lye was stronger than necessary.  With ripe olives it is desirable to use salt and lye together to prevent softening, and the common prescription is two ounces of potash lye and four ounces of salt to the gallon of water after the bitterness is largely removed by using one or two treatments with two ounces of lye to the gallon without the salt.  It is necessary to draw off the solution, rinse well, and put on fresh solution several times during the process to get the best results.

Seedling Olives Must Be Grafted.

Will olive trees grown from the olive seed be the right thing to plant? 
Will they be true to the parent tree or will they have to be grafted?

Olives which a seedling olive tree will bear will be, as a rule, very inferior and generally of the type of the wild olive.  All such trees must be grafted in order to produce any particular variety which you desire.

Olives, Oranges and Peppers.

We have been told that olive trees easily become infested with a fungus disease which they then impart to the orange tree.  The same objection is raised to the planting of pepper trees.  May this be true in some parts of the State and not in others?

The fungus of which you have heard is the “black smut.”  It is a result, not a cause.  It grows on the honey dew exuded from scale insects and if your trees have no scale they have no fungus.  The olive trees and pepper trees may communicate this trouble to citrus trees, or vice versa — whichever gets it first gives it away to the other.  If you will work hard enough to kill the scale wherever it appears you can have all these trees, but, of course, it costs a lot to fight scale on big pepper trees, and it is, therefore, wisest usually to choose an ornamental tree not likely to accept the scale.

Budding Olive Seedlings.

I have planted olive seeds which are just sprouting now.  Can these be budded next June or July in the nursery row, or can they be bench-grafted the following winter?

Your seedlings may make growth enough to spur-bud this summer.  The ordinary plate-bud does not take freely with the olive.  Some of them may do this; other seedlings may be slow and have to be budded in the second summer.  Watch the size and the sap flow so that the bark will lift well - which may not be at just the time that deciduous trees are budded.  It may be both earlier or later in the season.  Graft evergreens like the olive in the nursery row; not by bench grafting.

Budding Old Olives.

I have seedling olive trees, set out in 1904, which I wish to change over to the Ascolano variety.  Which is the best way to do it, by budding or grafting, and what is the proper time?