Studies on Flowering and Fruit Set of Some Olive Cultivars Under Assiut Environments

Abstract

Olive acreage IS ranked the 4

111

fruit crop m Egypt after citrus,

grapes and peaches with 87,083 feddan representing 9.0% of total I Egyptian land devoted for fruit crops (967,082 feddans).

I Olive acreage in 1997 was estimated by 87,083 feddans producing about 220,412 tons (average 3.78 ton/feddan). Nevertheless, there were I 58,331 feddans in production (66.98% of total area) and the rest (28,752 feddan) are considered unfruitful yet. New reclaimed area (out of valley)

planted with olive was estimated by 57,738 feddans representing 66.30% I• of total area of olive plantation in Egypt.

Middle and Upper Egypt Governorates contributed with 17.56% of nation olive area (15,294 feddans). Olive is found to be spread southward I to Qena while no record of olive plantation in Luxor and Aswan (Statistics Dept., Ministry of Agriculture, 1997). Although the latest I statistics showed that Assiut has only 230 feddans about I ,200 feddans have been already planted with olive during the last two years in the reclaimed soils east of Assiut in the Assiuti Valley and expected to be I more. Such shortage in olive area in the south of Egypt might be due to lower productivity of olive tree. Therefore, the present investigation is I considering some of factors that would shed some lights on problems associated with olive tree productivity under Assiut environments.

This investigation was carried out on four olive cultivars namely, I Kronaki, Cairo 7, Wardan and Frantoio through three successive seasons (1996, 1997 and 1998) at the Experimental Orchard of the Faculty of I Agriculture, Assiut University. The selected uniformly vigorous trees

were randomly selected from each cv. Such trees were II years old and planted at 5x5 meters apart, in a clay type of soil.