Let the plants do your job! Jujube and olive trees

Organic farming, whilst friendly to the environment, brings quite some head scratching when thinking about how to ensure the olive gets the best conditions to grow and produce its fruits. There's quite a lot of additional work to be done if you want to avoid chemical fertilizers and insecticides, and more often than not it's quite time consuming.

One of the most feared enemies of a healthy olive, and consequently of a perfect olive oil, is the olive fruit fly (Bactrocera oleae, wikipedia article here). Google can confirm that I am not exaggerating the problem: you get more than 20 million results if you try a search for this little fly...

So what can we do to improve our chances against this small fly whilst keeping human intromission as low as possible? One of the answers is planting jujube trees around the orchard. Ok, some explanation is due: the jujube, except for producing a tasty and healthy fruit:

which by the way looks surprisingly similar in colour, size and shape to the olive, is host to (another!) fly called Carphomya incompleta. So where's the link you ask? Well, the said fly is used as host for the larvae of a small wasp called Psyttalia (Opius) concolor. Those little wasps, being more gourmands than gourmets, do use the olive fly to ffed their larvaes on if there's no jujube fly at hand, hence why we like them.

Therefore I got myself some jujube plants, which were kindly offered by the tree we have at home in the form of offshoots and used an otherwise boring, foggy, rainy, winter day

and planted the small jujube trees here and there amongst the olives

 Let's hope they attract some very fertile little wasps, although I must confess I'm looking forward to the fruits too!