[John J]

Olive picking time is here again. Our trees this year produced a very poor harvest and for the first time for many years did not yield sufficient oil to see us through until next year, so we will be forced to purchase oil. However, apparently we are not alone in this as overall production on the island is forecast to be at least a third lower than last year. This is following a trend over the last few years whereby 2013 production was 30% lower than 2012 and that was 12% lower than 2011.
Lower than average production levels predicted for several other Mediterranean countries would appear to be caused by the olive fly and olive moth but this seems not to be the case for Cyprus where unfavourable weather conditions, especially a lack of rain, seem to be to blame.
What is the situation in your area? Is the olive crop good, bad or indifferent, and if bad what's the cause?

[JTh]

We had a very poor crop in Halkidiki (northern Greece), less than ten percent of the bumper crop we had in 2012, last year we had almost nothing. The quality this year was very poor as well, and the olive fruit fly was the main culprit, as a result of a fairly cool and wet summer and autumn. Half of our olives had already fallen down before we started harvesting, much earlier than normal, we were finished before going to the AGM. Almost every olive was damaged by the fruit fly.

[Alice]

Our harvest on Paros (southern Greece) was excellent. The individual olives were small and had ripened very early (from the end of September). We picked ours in the first week of October (about two weeks earlier than normal). Very little olive fly damage. We ended up with 10 kilos of olives for pickling and 18 kilos of oil, from eight fairly small trees. Rainfall over the year was very low but it had rained when the trees were setting fruit and they were watered automatically once a week in June, July and August. The general consensus on the island was that it was a good year. In contrast our crop in 2013 had been atrocious and olive fly damage severe.

[Joanna Savage]

Newspaper reports say that the Tuscan olive harvest is 40percent below average this year. The main blame is focussed on a very wet July which is usually bone dry. After another 130 mms rain last weekend, here in the foothills of the Appennines the olive trees are resembling hydroponic  lettuces with not a fruit to be seen.

[John J]

Yesterday I received a postcard sent from SW Turkey. Apparently the sender had also suffered a poor olive harvest last year, due to hailstorms at blossom time followed by 6-7 months of intense heat, and was in consequence being forced to buy oil for the first time in many years.
I am posting this here as there was no return address on the card and I wanted to let the sender know that I had received it. So, Meryem (I hope I have that correct), I apologise for the length of time it has taken to respond but I did only get your card yesterday (31 December) even though it is postmarked the 26 Kasim 2014 (I believe that is 26 November). I think that certainly qualifies as 'snail mail'.

[meltemi]

hello John J - İ sent you that postcard just before joining the MGS Forum  (the length of time it took to arrive reflecting the state of non-relations between the two countries!)
and as i related to you we have been seeing declining harvests over the last few years but this year was catastrophic for
our area (other areas in coastal Turkey were good or excellent however).  Another victim of climate change here has been my Cretan palm tree (indeed all the Cretan palm trees in our area) which is dying due to an infestatıon
 of the Egyptian red palm weevil which has been making inroads since 2005 in jTurkey and reached our area late last summer - these large weevils burrow into the heart of the palm and chew up the stems with ferocious incisors making a fermented mash of the heart of the palm then leave their larvae to develop over the winter, the larvae make  cocoons for themselves with this same fibrous palm husk and then will emerge in the f irst heat of spring to attack again.  İ don't know if my beautiful palm will survive - i doubt it.  Have you heard or experienced similar cases of this in Cyprus?   greetings Meryem
p.s.  İ forget the scientific name of this palm but will look it up - i know the origin of all the Cretan palm trwees in Turkey come from the palm forest on the Vai peninsula  on southeastern Crete and palm seedlings probably washed up on southwestern Turkish shores due to the prevalent sea currents pushing them in that direction and took root.

[meltemi]

The scientific name of the Cretan date palm is Phoenix theophrasti...

[John J]

Hi, it's good to make proper contact. The palm trees in Cyprus have certainly suffered from the dreaded weevil, including one in my own garden. On our daughter's 17th birthday the parents of her then boyfriend gave her a small palm in a pot as a houseplant. She kept it in her bedroom for many years, with several pottings on, until the day it became too large for the house and I planted it in the garden to the front of the house, more or less below her bedroom window. Her relationship with that particular boyfriend didn't flourish but the palm did, becoming a handsome specimen, until a couple of years ago, about 25 years after she first acquired it, the beetle struck. It was very sudden and without warning, too late to attempt anything by the time we realised what was happening. It was a major job to remove the dead trunk but we managed it eventually.

[andrewsloan]

We alternate between 700kgs and 1300kgs each year, so this year's 700 kgs at our finca in Malaga province was normal. The yield was 17%, lower than last year's 25% due to rain before the harvest time in November.
A local taxi driver told me that the Italian olive trees have been badly hit by a disease coming from Oleanders which was why their harvest is down so much.

[John J]

Today's Guardian Weekly newspaper has an article stating how 2014 has been labelled a 'black year' for the olive oil industry due to dreadful harvests in several of the major producing countries. The blame is put on unusual weather, a proliferation of insects and bacterial blight. It seems that Spain had hot late spring weather while Italy suffered from pests and adverse weather which reduced their harvest by 40% to 50% over 2013. Apparently in southern Italy fruit was also destroyed by large flocks of starlings. Greece was more stable but Morocco and Tunisia had bad weather and the civil war in Syria affected their production. It seems that the USA may soon enter the market with olive trees being planted in California and Texas.

[meltemi]

California black olives esp. canned and bottled ones are quite large and lustrous-looking but (much like most California culture itself) absolutely without taste - hardscrabble conditions tend to accentuate the taste of olives (although not to the punishing extent of last year's conditions).

[Pia]

Andrewsloan do
mention on 5. January something about an oleander-disease and the bad olive harvest.
Does anyone know what this could be.
We have some oleanders with a disease (they call it cancer), and we cut the stems infested, naturally, and burn it. But some of our olive trees have the same on some branches.
Should we simply dig out the infested oleander and burn the whole plant?

[JTh]

Take a look at the thread  'Xylella fastidiosa - a new threat to olive trees in Europe' at this link http://www.mgsforum.org/smf/index.php?topic=1964.0.

[John J]

Pia, I would definitely advise against burning oleander, the smoke is also toxic and breathing in the fumes can be very hazardous to both humans and animals.

[Pia]

Thank you so much for warning us We are taking care of the smoke and know it is poisonous.
I am so happy to say that it definitely is not the disease from Italy, which I have seen mentioned at The Forum. Let us hope that it will be stopped where it is.