In my opinion, I think the Manzanillo olive (table olive) and the Picual olive (for oil) are the best choices for southern CA and many other regions of the world.
Some olives are starting to trickle in now:
although tiny, arbequina are delicious
I’m sure you’ll enjoy them
Yes, they are tiny compared to most table olives that I’ve come across. The trees are also fairly compact and fit well into my landscape. A true edible ornamental.
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I have never grown olive plants, very curious about things that are related to olive plants. I have two questions: 1) Is the Arbequina olives’ bloom fragrant? 2) why you soak Olives in water/liquid?
Olives are trees, most get huge and are very long lived, but these Spanish olives stay small and don’t live as long. The Spanish olives can be maintained just like other BYOC fruit trees for the most part. ‘Arbequina’ does set fruit better with a pollenizer such as ‘Arbosana’.
I didn’t notice much if any fragrance, certainly nothing like citrus, perhaps other varieties or larger plantings might perform differently.
Raw olives are very bitter --so some level of processing is required. I’m following the directions for kalamata-style olives from this UC Davis document:
http://anrcatalog.ucdavis.edu/pdf/8267.pdf
Thanks, MrClint. I had fresh green olives in China which are little tart/bitter but have sweet after taste. The inside of olive stone( don’t know how to called it, pit? core? ) tasted delicious.
brine-cured style is very usual for arbequina variety, perhaps due to its small size … cutting each olive individually could be tedious if you have many
The ‘Arbequina’ olives are now in their final spicy herb brine. They taste great, and can sit in the refrigerator for up to a year. One jar has fresh thyme and the other has rosemary as the herbal element. Otherwise both jars have whole garlic cloves, fresh cayenne pepper pods, and lemon slices in the kosher salt and white wine vinegar solution:
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