🌳 Olive grove

An olive grove is a piece of land planted with olive trees, whose fruit is picked for oil and table olives. Olive trees grow mainly between 30 and 45 degrees of latitude in both hemispheres, and almost the entire crop, 98 per cent according to the International Olive Council, is harvested in the Mediterranean. Worldwide, olive trees cover more than 11 million hectares.

Traditional groves are still the most common: the trees stand far apart, 50–100 per hectare, often on slopes and without irrigation. Their yield is small, from less than one to five tonnes of fruit per hectare. Intensive orchards have 200–550 trees per hectare and are usually irrigated. Super-intensive hedgerow orchards have 1,000–2,000 trees per hectare and are worked by harvesters that drive over the row. Only a few varieties suit them, the best known being Arbequina, Arbosana and Koroneiki.

Oil output also depends on density: according to an International Olive Council study, it ranges from 370 kilograms per hectare in traditional groves on slopes to almost 1,600 kilograms in super-intensive orchards.

Olive trees are propagated from cuttings of known varieties, not from seed. A tree bears a commercial crop for about 50 years, but some olive trees live for hundreds or even thousands of years. Old trunks are often hollow.