posted 15 years ago
In lots of olive groves the soils are kept bare, so olive groves becomes a sort of open wood which as the leaves of the trees are very pruned can't provide much organic matter in the form of leaf fall from the trees, the last i heard about what was beign prunned off them was that it would be good to make bio-fuels so the prunning of or used to feed cows sheep and goats whose dejections would return a part of it to be burnt, and as the ground is kept bare have no ground plants to provide organic material with their leaves and stems or roots. They are places were soils are drained rather than developed.
Pasture type ground cover dries in spain in the suimmer mounths so it does not compete with trees in these driest mounths, that are also the mounths when the fruit is developing.
One person said a little competition was a lot. In poor soils yes, but if the soils got really good as they would with grass and clover growing at the foot of these trees that dried in summer to resprout in wih¡nter so providing organic matter and gets incorporated into the soil and also that would protect the soil from wind and rain erosion, the competition they provided would be more than com'pensated by the advantages they posed.
The lack of ground cover also means soils exposed to erosion from the wind and rain.
It also means the ground is exposed to the heat of the sun. Maybe olives like this, it is so hot in summer that it is hard to imagine they don't have plenty of heat anyway with out getting more from the heated floor or more light reflected off the earth. Dry grass is also very reflective grass is full of silicate. Roland Ennos.
These woods thouugh full of trees porvide very little shade to the land, just imagine what shade there would be if these trees were really big trees and olives can be tall if you don't prune them and if you had the shade of ground cover as well, the shade situation in these woods would be really different.
Leaves must cool the air as it passes the leaves, like car radiators cool a car. Less leaves more heat and greater dryness.
As leaves cool and humidify the air they make it more likely that the humidity will saturate the air condense and fall as rain. Trees bring rain reducing any need to irrigate these hardy trees.
I am posting a photo of a olive grove with its bare soils and a lot of the olive goves i have seen here have bare soils like this one. If you drive through Jaen you drive through hours of olive grove or that is how i remember it, so you can imagine, it is a pretty big expanse of olive groves even if i can't remember exactly how much.
Vine yards are often the same, places with no grass, as are citrus fruit groves this makes mediteranean fruit growing very un-ecological and not at al sutainable, as their methods of reducing ground cover increase in efficiency, i suppose they used to use animals to overgraze it to kkep the ground cover down, instead of taking them off the land befoer they over graze it you make sure they go back over it to kill off any shoots that try to revive ao animals serve to keep places free of vegaetation should htat be your aim.
Uusing more mecanised methodes and probably herbicides to keep down ground cover, they certainly wont have any ground vegetation to provide organic material in the soil to absorb and retain water and nutrients. The ltoatl lack of organic matter will mean watering the olives, worse the lack o fall ground cover will make the soil being carried away by the wind and rain a certanty so unless they are in an area with a great depth f sandy material they will get down to bare rock. agri rose macaskie. .
olivo-2.jpg
