Page:The Olive Its Culture in Theory and Practice.djvu/165

Rh skin finally wrinkles and the color becomes a dull black. This is the state in which it is popularly supposed to give the most oil, which we have already shown to be a fallacy but even granting it to be true, the quality is inferior, the flavor gross and the oil soon becomes rancid. An olive is fully ripe when on being squeezed between the thumb and finger the soft pulp shows no white, but for many reasons, as we have seen, it may be desirable to forestall this period.

No time can be set when an olive crop should be harvested. It may vary by weeks from one season to another, and it is far better on every account to anticipate, than to defer the harvest. The berries should be carefully gone over and all leaves and dirt picked out; the former giving a bitter taste to the oil and the latter lessening the quantity as well as lowering the quality.

What will an olive orchard produce? As we have seen, it is customary in Spain in estimating the annual oil product of an orchard to calculate that every six trees will give four gallons of oil. This at first glance appears to be a very small yield, but it must be remembered that it is an estimate applied to the whole face of the country, that olive trees are very numerous in Spain and many orchards are very old and in a poor state of cultivation. Also that it is a general annual estimate independent of fluctuations from year to year.

A careful observation of the olive districts in Italy by Professor Caruso, extending over many years, shows that the greatest production is found in Sicily, but not the finest quality. The Sicilian product runs as high as ninety gallons of oil to the acre, falling to fifty in Liguria and the Neapolitan States, which would give a mean of seventy gallons to the acre for the whole of Italy.

Mr. Cooper makes the statement that on a piece of two acres of ground seven year old trees averaged one hundred and twenty-two pounds of olives per tree.

On the Quito Farm, Mission olive trees which were grown from