A couple of years ago I spent a month taking photos of olive flower buds, every day. The idea being that it would absolutely track, with some accuracy, the progress and date of peak flowering.

We use that flowering date to predict the best date for harvest.

Olive flowers about to bust out

But this year the trees have been all over the place. Two weeks back I was thinking they were staggered....some were almost popping and others had weeks to go to form up proper flower buds. In retrospect that was wrong. The underdeveloped buds have simply not progressed. What we are looking at now is a small percentage of trees in heavy bloom, the majority with no flowers, or few flowers.

We normally have a week of heavy rain sometime in October. It flogs whatever fruit trees are blossoming, and we find that one year we'll have no stone fruit, or no apples, because the trees flowered during the rain and simply didn't set fruit.

But its happening now, as the olive trees are flowering. So, what few trees are blossoming are probably not going to set a lot of fruit.

We'll know in a month or so, but at this stage I would have to say its unlikely we will have enough olives to justify the cost of a harvest.

That would make it three years in a row without a crop. Hard to sustain a business under those constraints.

In terms of the cause of all of this.....this year I have not found any Lace Bug. We were spraying late October last year, but so far this year I haven't seen any. I've looked at a couple of other olive groves to check their status, and again, haven't found any Lace Bug. Its very odd....I was of the belief it was the hot steamy conditions that provoked the tidal wave plague of Lace Bug two years ago. This year, in our grove ( and in others) I am seeing more Peacock Spot than normal. This is a fungal problem, we usually have a tiny amount of it that dries up and disappears over our hot summer, but this year there quite a bit of it about. Which doesn't make sense, you would think the conditions where Peacock Spot and Lace Bug thrive would match.

Overall the trees look ok. That is, the pruned trees have responded dramatically, with heavy, lush new growth. The unpruned trees look a little sad in that there is a LOT of remnant dead twigs that will need to be removed. Overall, about 20 trees have either died from the Lace Bug damage, or become unusable for mechanical harvesting.

Normally I would not consider any pruning this time of year, as anything cut is probably removing potential olives. But with so many trees simply not flowering I can continue to heavy pruning I started last year....( I haven't finished. It's just me, it takes awhile to get all the trees pruned.) So I figured I would walk through the olive trees with a marker and mark anything not flowering. The mark will still be there in a few weeks time when the blossom has gone. Those trees can be pruned, and they will have a long time before the next flowering to recover.

When it stops raining.....

Oh well, even when cropping is a disaster, it is still very beautiful!

Extra comment: The pruning can be a cause of non-flowering. Olive flowers don't appear on new growth, so if I prune too late although the tree looks good, you won't see any flowers in that year. But.....the middle paddock wasn't pruned. None of those trees have flowered.

In the main paddock where most of the flowering is happening, I have a Mistake tree. "Mistake" in that I was pruning the last tree in a row when my last pruning-tool battery died. I had only completed one half of the tree.

"I'll come back and start here next time," I thought as I packed up, and promptly forgot.

So the half-pruned tree recovered as best it could. Theoretically, you should find no flowers on the new growth half, and the untouched half should have flowers.
On this tree both sides have no flowers.