News from the orchard

Yesterday during the routine check I noticed three generations of jasmine moth feeding on our young  trees. Not in all the orchards, but in a good half of them. There are some fat, green and big caterpillars almost ready to reshape themselves into moths, younger siblings in their teenage days, and barely visible youngsters of few millimeters in length. All enjoying a nice meal courtesy of the undersigned&family. It is quite a spreaded attack, so the plan was to spray them today, however the weather, windy and bearing an open promise of rain, does not seem to care that much about our needs. In fact, it is already some three weeks of english spring weather here: lots of wind, and raining every second day. Any intervention is therefore pointless, as the organic treatments need some time to produce an effect - a rain shower few hours after the application means having done a pointless effort. I guess sometimes one just needs to accept the facts as they are, since nature is not really into the wish-fulfilling business. You may have predicted many potential problems, tried to prevent them, worked tirelessly to achieve the best result, but yours is rarely the last word, having Ishtar/Gaia/Mother nature as interlocutor. It does however put the events of life, and one's influence on them, into perspective: anybody who has sailed through a proper gale or got caught by a storm whilst mountaineering will know that.

Anyway, Insha'Allah, in few weeks it will be harvest time!

Electronic issues resolved

I hope to everybody's satisfaction!

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Electronic issues

It may be quite obvious, but I must confess I have been messing around with the layout and obviously amending bits of program code that should have been left alone (like in  Mr.Bean's movie, Whistler's mother portrait mess, or the spanish Ecce homo "restorer":...

Hope to fix it during the weekend...

New orchards - six months of work in two pictures

Although I was planning to call it before and after, looking at the "before" pics I see a lot of work had already been done - olive orchards, turned by neglect and lapse of time almost into a forest, had already been cleared of the mediterranean jungle of junipers, bushes and undergrowth. For the rest, I believe the pictures speak by themselves.

So, here is what has been done in the last six months in some of the reclaimed orchards (as alwys, you can click on the pictures to see them in detail):

before

after

before

after

before

 

after

Heavy artillery

Well, browsing through the pics for the post below I found two of them that did not fit in any post so far, so I guess we should give them the space they deserve. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the Shermans (or Abrams?) of the insect world:

Jurassic park lookalike, isn't he/she?

I wonder if the intention was joining the air forces...

Orchard residents

Ok, this may already be a bit of a deja vu, however I'm still impressed by the number of insects which make theirs a landscape if the same is left insecticide-free. Maybe the widest array of shapes and colours belong to the spider world:

Should we call him pinky?

Another fan of bright coloured dresses...

This one reminds me of a three piece suit englishman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Any Rorshach fans around?

It must be said, grasshoppers also come in some great shapes and colours:

Is this all? Well, If you are still interested here are some more shots of our other residents (well, the ones that let me take a portrait, actually...):

Book review: Monocultivar olive oil by Mr.Celletti

Should you wish to read a brief, well written, sharp and in many places ironic if not caustic overview of beliefs and misbeliefs, as well as more than some myths and truths about olives and olive oil, this is the book for you. I read it in italian, but Mr.Celletti had the book translated and is now available in english too.

Steering well clear from technicalities and deep dwellings about specific issues,

Update from the olive grove: fire and insects (part two)

As if the drought, the fires, the variuos insect attacks were not enough, something unknown got noticed some time ago in one orchard. The weakest young trees were consistently loosing leaves from part of the branches, which in some cases were (are) completely essiccating.

At closest inspection, the reason for the above seemed to be those small scratches/holes:

You can see here another branch, showing the same pattern:

Update from the olive grove: fire and insects (part one)...

Well, where should I start from? Our continuous checks are going on and probably in the next few days we'll have to battle the Jasmine Moth again. The fall in temperature and the rain of the last few days have been a blessing for our not so friendly cohabitant, and the population is slowly but steadily picking up from its normal number to proper mass scale invasion again.

Plus, we had two events, one of which is bad for sure whilst the other still needs to be assessed properly.

There was a number of wildfires sprouting here and there during the summer - one of the biggest in our region brushed our biggest orchards but few of the smaller ones were not that lucky. So far, we completely lost to the fire about 70 young trees, with at least twice this number being shocked by the temperature, but with some chance of surviving.

This is the view of the non cultivated land on the approachs to our grove:

Whilst this is how the burnt young trees look like: