Time to get serious about olives!
Inspired by my recent visit to the Mediterranean - went out and bought a few more olive trees!
We've already got a number of olive trees growing in the Tinui Food Forest- most of them are still young, although we have 2 that are producing.And the inspiration- well take a look at some of the photos from our holiday- 1000+ years old olive trees- still producing olives. Beautiful trees. And they must be tough to have goats grazing around them.
Some interesting olive tree facts:
1. You don't get olive trees that produce green or black olives- the green olives turn black when they are ripe.
2. Olive trees can live thousands of years- and can produce olives even at those advanced ages.
3. Tough- they can be burned, frosted, diseased- and still come back to life.
4. They can tolerate growing in stones! In Greece they love the olive trees- a lot of the hills in Greece have lost the soil on the hills- basically soil has been eroded away and they are left with rock. And yes, olive trees don't mind!
The young olive trees that I bought are all of the type that will grow large olives- for eating as opposed to oil production. I don't think we will ever have enough olive trees here to justify getting the olives pressed for oil. But who knows- maybe we could start to plant out our hills with olive trees- as long as we can keep our goats away from them while they are young. And from what I saw- goats and olive trees may possibly just work out!
