It is difficult to imagine that flowers may still develop; it should be too late for that. The best hope is that some trees in some groves will have blossoms, because not all groves could be thoroughly inspected due to the mud and the rain intervals. Otherwise, there will probably be a total crop failure this year. And that’s to be expected, because our agrotechnician, Aris, and befriended producers from the region also confirmed the catastrophe. It particularly affects the ‘Manaki’ trees, while the ‘Koroneiki’, which originates from the even milder region of Koroni in south-western Peloponnese, is blooming this year yet again.

A possible cause for the situation might lie in the natural cycle of the olive tree. The olive tree produces well every other year and last year would have been a year of plenty if the heat wave at the end of May hadn’t “burned” most of the blossoms (you can read our reports from April to June 2022). But that alone probably doesn’t sufficiently explain the complete absence of flowers. Rather, the cause seems to lie in the previous warm and dry winter. Olive trees need a certain hours of cold(about 500-550 hours at about 5 °C) to be able to form flower-bearing buds and the trees probably didn’t get enough cold last winter.