Jorge Adams, age 9, of Louisville, Kentucky, for his question:

Can I grow an olive tree from a seed?

This just might work if you lived in the right part of California and picked a ripe olive from a tree. The seed in the olive might just grow, though very, very slowly. Actually, olive trees grow only in certain places. The winters must be mild, the summers long and warm, without too much rainfall. In parts of California there are 32,000 acres of olive groves. Every year they bear 58,000 tons of delicious olives. Olive trees also grow in southern states by the Gulf of Mexico, but usually these trees do not bear olives.

Fresh olives are very bitter and all sorts of things must be done before we can eat them. This harsh treatment makes the olives taste delicious. But it tends to make the seeds useless. For this reason, the seed from a. supermarket olive is not likely to sprout and grow a tree.