Or other fruits. Those trees that are thousands of years old. Are their fruits edible and good?
What about younger trees? Is an orange from a 80 yr old tree tastier than one from a 5 year old tree?
If there are differences, what are the causes and variables?
No cite, but ISTR reading somewhere that IF you plant your orange trees today, and IF they aren’t killed by disease or drought or whatever, and IF you care for them properly, then you MIGHT have a viable orange crop in 100 years.
Lauren, age 9, asked the Texas citrus cowboy this question:
Olive trees on the other hand start producing fruit at 7 years and is considered mature after 50 years but productivity incresaes up to about 100 years, and then stays high, maybe forever. (Or at lest a thousand years.) Some people claim that quality increases all the time.
I think that the info provided by the citrus cowboy might be a bit deceptive. As I understand it, many, if not most, citrus crops are not sown from seed but clones grafted onto rootstocks of other (more fungus-resistant) species, primarily sour orange.
So, somewhere in the five year range for edible fruit, I can see that’s possible.
But edible doesn’t have to mean palatable, right? If an olive tree is “mature” after 50 years, that’s still a 43 yr gap.
A Nova on old trees had me remembering the trees at my old “growin’ up” home. We had avacado and lemon trees that were well over 50 years old (from the original owner’s best recollection), a fig tree/bush about 20 yrs old, and a peach tree Dad planted around the time I was born (or very young). I used to pick the fruits of the trees. The avacado and lemons were extremely savory, the peaches tasted like slighty soft rocks. I don’t like figs, but Mom said they were good. We left that place when I was 10.
So, since the young tree’s fruit was nasty, but the older tree’s fruit was good, it got me wondering if there was an age window on tasty, or if it remains a quality fruit for the life of tree after maturing.
The clone/grafting reference is interesting. Any details?
For wine grapes (which are pretty much all grafted onto hearty base stock) you get fruit the second or third year and it isn’t high quality until the 5th or beyond. You can have high quality production for decades, but for many types it goes downhill after 40-50 years.