Content
- Olive trees can live for many hundreds of years
- Olives are year-old crops
- The oldest olive trees in the world
- Olives grow very slowly
- Tips & Tricks
Olive trees can live for many hundreds of years
The oil fruit or olive was next to the vine and fig tree one of the promises of the Old Testament - the Jews found them in the Promised Land already as a crop. As a rule, olive trees are between 300 and 600 years old.
Olives are year-old crops
An olive tree can live for many hundreds of years, in some cases even between about 2019 and 3000 years. The crop originating from the Middle East has been cultivated in the eastern Mediterranean area over 5000 years ago. The wild form found in the Mediterranean maquis is a tree similar in appearance, but with thorny branches, smaller leaves and small, bitter, unusable stone fruits.
The oldest olive trees in the world
The gnarled, mostly consisting of several tribes olive trees have a trunk circumference of about 10 to 12 meters and still bear fruit every year. Since trees age differently than humans or animals, such age records are not uncommon. Trees, especially olive trees, have the ability to regenerate, d. H. they can replace dead parts. Trees usually die because they are too big and can no longer provide more distant plant parts.
Olives grow very slowly
Olives are among the extremely slow-growing plants, they add only about an inch in circumference per year. Especially at a young age, they mainly grow in height and only later in width. Especially older olive trees have a bizarre appearance, but their trunks are full of holes and depressions, also heavily twisted. Olive farmers think that the more gnarled a tree looks like, the more yield it brings. Olives bear fruit only very late, at the earliest from an age between five to seven years an olive tree blossoms for the first time. The plant is only in the prime of its power between its 40th and 150th year - which is why a Greek proverb says that a farmer does not plant olive trees for himself, but for his children and grandchildren.
Tips & Tricks
Basically, olive trees are quite boring plants: year after year, not much is happening. But they are extremely undemanding and do not neglect neglect. Ergo, olives are the perfect trees for beginners.