Olive trees are money makers
In the Valley, we’re blessed with relatively warm weather. Unless we get a freeze.
I hate freezes, so I’m hoping we don’t get one this winter. But every now and then, $#@& happens, and here comes a Blue Norther dropping the mercury down south of 32 degrees Fahrenheit or 0 if you’re counting in Celsius.
Plants die, the grass turns brown, and we lose some bushes while some Snowbird from Minnesota still walks around in a T-shirt and shorts saying, “Why, this isn’t so cold. What’s wrong with you people?” Our blood is thinner than yours?
Thankfully, one of the favorite trees in our yard is the olive tree (my wife’s idea to plant it), and since it’s now going on 10 years old, if we’re unlucky enough to have a freeze from here on out, there’s a good chance it will survive Mother Nature’s winter blast. According to info I gathered from a Texas Aggie horticulture site, there is a caveat, however.
There’s a risk of damage to the olive tree if the temperature is 95 degrees one day and 25 degrees the next. Hello, Rio Grande Valley. Last winter was like that, if I recall, albeit we didn’t drop below 32. Maybe Starr County, but I don’t think Hidalgo. Although the wind chill felt like it sometimes. Still, a large drop in temperature from one day to the next is considered normal in the RGV.
According to the Aggie material, the olive tree will sustain damage to leaves and small stems at minus 17 degrees and more serious damage if we drop below 12 degrees. Don’t think we’ve ever gotten that cold here, even though it’s felt like it.
Here comes the guy from Minnesota again, “Twelve degrees isn’t that cold.”
If the temp drops from 95 to 25 one day to the next, with high wind and low humidity, the freeze injury to the olive tree can be more severe, reads the Aggie lore: aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu.
Olive trees go way back in time, by the way. What did the bird Noah send out return with? An olive leaf. At one horticulture site, it says this about the ancient tree:
“At a site in Spain, carbon-dating has shown olive seed found there to be 8,000 years old. O. europaea (botanists are into Latin) may have been cultivated independently in two places, Crete and Syria.Archeological evidence suggest that olives were being grown in Crete as long ago as 2,500 B.C. From Crete and Syria olives spread to Greece, Rome and other parts of the Mediterranean area.
Apparently, the olive tree arrived in the Valley area in about the 1700s. Because of the temps colder the further north you go, you don’t find many north of SanAntonio.
In the last four years, however, more olive trees than ever have been planted in the Lone Star State. Their number is now estimated at approximately 700,000. And they’re making people money, thanks to the lucrative olive oil they produce, which until the mid-2002 was largely centered in California.
In the late 1900s, a Ft. Worth native by the name of Jim Henry arrived in Central Texas after spending time in Spain and decided he could make a go of olive oil production. He’s now knows as the “JohnnyAppleseed of Texas Olives.”
His first tree farm was near Austin (Marble Falls), but a freeze killed them, so he moved further south to the SanAntonio area (Carrizo Springs) and started experimenting with 10 different types of olive trees (Greek, Italian and Spanish). Bingo. He found the right one in 2005 (Spanish, naturally) and planted 40,000 trees, and four years later, the first crop of olives bloomed. In 2010, the business he and a partner started, The Texas Olive Ranch, produced the largest crop of olives in the history of the entire southern United States.
He’s since expanded to the Victoria area, where Texas Olive has planted 50,000 trees.
Hey, Jim, we can use you in the Valley. The jobs, the money, the conservation of land before more of it’s paved over with concrete. Welcome, Texas Olive Ranch to the RGV?
In the meantime, at least one Olive Tree adorns our front yard.