At our olive pruning workshop, we had the guidance of Sr. Manuel, a retired professional pruner. At first he was a bit hard to follow as he immediately jumped up a tree and started working, but as people gathered around him, and the end result for the first tree started to appear, things got clearer.
The trees we were pruning where trees I had been pruning partially last year and others that had been neglected for over a decade. Last year I had chosen to leave some major secondary branches on all primary branches, to avoid reducing the crown so much, that the roots would suffer. This technique was not ideal. It made the appearance of new shoots much less vigorous than it might have been, if I had at least stripped half of the primary branches all but completely.
This year I learned that on heavily neglected trees, you cut almost everything, leaving nothing but a couple of small outward shoots at the extremity of the primary branches. These little shoots will keep the flux of juices going inside the branch. As there is almost nothing left for the branch to invest it's energy in, it will start to produce a big number of new shoots. These new shoots are the ones that will be loaded with olives in two years.
Some other things I picked up during Mr. Manel's demonstration, is that you can always leave a shoot at the base of a branch, to protect it from the sun, and that you avoid to cut branches at a low position going outward. You will want to keep these last ones to open the crown in years to come.
As for the tools we used, Sr. Manel was not enthusiastic about the 6€ pruning saws I bought from Vito. He swears by Belotta, a Spanish brand. He kept repeating that his saw had been used so often, and still cut better than the new ones we had.
In conclusion, we had a good time, getting tired up the trees, and were very lucky with the weather. I think everybody learned a lot, in the 3 hours Sr. Manel guided us through the pruning process. I hope he will be with us next year, for a more in depth workshop.
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