>If you plant enough new olives from seed then you can eventually find and develop a variety that grows well in your particular climate.
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.