olive info (anyone grow any?) (Trees)

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Is anybody raising olives with sales of olive oil in mind? What climate, how many years, costs to start up, diseases,varities,ect.?

-- mitch hearn (moopups1@aol.com), June 13, 2001

Answers

Response to olive info

Some of our California brethren can probably advise better than I but olives want long periods of warm weather, no subfreezing temperatures and low air humidity. The humidity thing is what strikes them off the list for Florida. Apparently they're pretty susceptible to fungal problems.

I'd swear that IFAS has some sort of olive growing around McCarty Hall over to Gainesville but I can't figure out quite what kind. It seems to be surviving just fine, makes fruit nearly every year but they're not very big and they're mostly pit. Don't think they're the eating kind but I really know little of olives. If anyone can successfully grow them here in Florida and get useful quantities of fruit from them I'd *really* like to know of it. So far I've had zip luck in finding any.

={(Oak)-

-- Live Oak (oneliveoak@yahoo.com), June 13, 2001.


Response to olive info

This is so weird. I was literally wondering whether or not I could grow olive trees here in Virginia not five minutes before I signed onto this site and here was the same questions I had. I was figuring that we had a warm enough climate but the humidity issue would preclude us from doing it as well. I wonder if there is some way I could over come that? Like maybe put them in hoop houses and have a solar dehumidifier rigged up. Okay, okay I'm crazy but I would sure have loved to grow some olive trees in my back yard. Yum!

-- Colleen (pyramidgreatdanes@erols.com), June 13, 2001.

Olive trees will definitely stand quite a bit of below-freezing winter weather, but I don't know the details. Investigate before you get put off. Do a google search, and also there should be heaps of info on USDA and state ag dept and college sites that's applicable to you.

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), June 13, 2001.

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