That said, olives would probably work well for it, considering their growth habit. Only as art, mind you, my wife and I'd fight over the one olive per year for the celebratory dinner salad.
The known-good techniques that produced long-term bonsai don't in any way whatsoever resemble the naive approach of "trimming" in the hedge pruning sense. This (along with the mistake of growing indoors) is why the vast majority of the public concludes bonsai is a dark art / impossible. Guessing at bonsai is like throwing rocks at a computer hoping that C code will just "happen" somehow.
If you have a sun-facing outdoor garden, know what the term "binary tree" means, and can describe a tree in terms of a data structure (nodes etc), then you have within you the ability to learn bonsai for realsies if you make contact with people who do it in real life. Olive bonsai trees are relatively common in mediterranean-climate bonsai scenes, like that of California's bonsai scene: https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-...
Trees like this are not grown on kitchen counters or in living rooms. _Maybe_ in a world-beating cannabis tent, but the hassle is extreme, and (going back to the topic of this thread), fighting diseases in the indoor cultivation environment is much much harder than outside.
But the Spanish monks who gave gave California olive trees were on to something. If you plant enough new olives from seed then you can eventually find and develop a variety that grows well in your particular climate. This obviates the need for sheltering the tree much or at all.
No offense mate but I bet if we accounted for the cost of your grow light setup your eventual harvest might could be some of the most expensive olives in the world. No hate though, I've got an olive tree indoors too (though just in a window).
Yeh, "Mission" olives. One of the cuttings is that. Allegedly one of the most cold-hardy cultivars. It might survive outside with our winters (yay global warming) if I get the trunk to about 4" before it has to make its own way outdoors. Hoping anyway.
>No offense mate but I bet if we accounted for the cost of your grow light setup your eventual harvest might could be some of the most expensive olives in the world.
Oh, for sure. These are my end-of-the-world olive trees. Mostly keeping them inside now because it's winter. Starting in March, they should be able to go outside until Halloween or so. I should be able to get more cuttings off of each (Mission, Pendolino, Arbequina), and make several dozen trees. But some will always be indoors as mother trees for more cuttings.
And yeh pineapples are absurd. But my daughter just finally nailed getting the tops to root... putting them in a jar of water just rots the crown here (air quality, humidity? dunno). She dried one out until it looked dead, then trimmed the bottom a bit more, and there was nice living tissue, a pretty yellow. That was able to be put to moisture, and it rooted in a few weeks. The greenhouse square footage for something like "one pineapple a month" would be on the order of 350sqft, and we're unclear if they can be staggered. Sometimes these plants decide to all bloom at once, even if some are overdue and others premature.
We have a list of "things we can't live without if the rest of you monkeys shit the bed and and can't sell it to us anymore".
If anyone knows anybody at Foundation Plant Services at UCB and would like to do me a favor, private message me? Just need someone to put in a word for me.
> We have a list of "things we can't live without if the rest of you monkeys shit the bed and and can't sell it to us anymore".
Not trying to be obtuse about this because I get it... but if we end up in this situation, I think olives and pineapples will be one of our least concerns. Both are great plants to grow and experiment with. I also grow olives, fruits, all kinds of berries, etc. But due to the rather interconnected nature of both the global economy and the global climate system, it may be that if we ever begin to see items like that in widespread failure we could simultaneously be overwhelmed w/ larger problems. Lets say massive food price inflation, isolated famines/shortages, and ultimately total base calories for our diet.
So while I don't disagree with your sentiment at all I would just say that I hope you have things like grains and staples on that list. Sweet potatoes are a relatively nutrient-rich and calorie dense food that are technically perennial and can be grown in similar format to how you describe your olives and pineapples (take them indoors in winter, use some greenhouses to extend season, etc). Bananas are similarly useful if you are in the right climate. In the biosphere 2 experiment, sweet potatoes constituted the bulk of their diet (source: https://ecotechnics.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Advances-...). In a worst case scenario we might even end up in victory garden type situation and need to plant corn, beans, etc wherever we have space to do so.
> anybody at Foundation Plant Services at UCB
As for this, I'm not in your region so I have no connections there but I highly recommend just finding a few names and emailing them about your project. I've done similar with people all over the and I normally do get a reply. Most recently an Israeli horticulturalist I had read about on HN responded and gave me germination tips for some trees I am growing after I emailed her.
Happy gardening mate. :)
Lower priority sure. But, people who only pay attention to the highest priorities are likely to be miserable even if they make it.
>So while I don't disagree with your sentiment at all I would just say that I hope you have things like grains and staples on that list.
I have things like Megasphaera hexanoica and Clostridium acetobutylicum on the list. Grains are there, but the truth of the matter is until I can secure acreage that stuff's put on hold. Am trying to find one of the old pull-type combines, some other equipment (I have storage if I can buy them now).
>but I highly recommend just finding a few names and emailing them about your project.
They're not interested in talking to me. Their minimum order's a little high for a cultivar of pistachio I need for rootstock, doesn't seem to be any other option. One or two nurseries will sell a single sapling for $70 or so, but multiplying that into the 20 or 30 trees I want to start with will take a long time. They sell seed for $1 each, but their minimum order's a bit absurd. Told me "that's just two pieces of budwood to get you to the minimum"... what am I going to do with budwood when I'm buying rootstock seed right this moment? My current plan is to just get terebinthus and vera seed, grow both, and hybridize them myself. Only a 10 yr setback, shouldn't be a problem.
I am doing some similar projects. I've got some acreage planted with chestnuts and a few other select trees. Going on three years now of planting. I haven't done a good job documenting things but putting together a talk about agriculture so maybe that will change.
> Their minimum order's a little high for a cultivar of pistachio I need for rootstock, doesn't seem to be any other option.
Sounds like you need some friends/neighbors/comrades to throw in with you on a group order. I have been in a similar place myself; I've roped a lot of friends into these schemes now. Last month I had 7 lbs of chestnuts sent to my buddy while I was out of the country haha.
Olive oil's already like $50 for a gallon can (and not much cheaper even if you eat the trash stuff). Were olive orchards inside, no one like you or me would ever get to enjoy them again.