The needle and the damage done

This little insect is becoming the main summer blues down here in Istria, and more often than not in the last days, Neil Young's song from which I shamelessly stolen the title for this post, is coming to my mind. The little bug is piercing a huge number of small olives, and as the situation is standing at the moment we are looking at a 50%+ loss of harvest.

A fistful of damage

Not a good outlook, especially as the instruments available to limit the damage are almost non-existent. But, as in any other field, any event brings lessons to be learned and has some positive, although minor, sides.

Something is still hanging on!

Some of the olives managed to survive, and are becoming "too big to fail" as the pierces now are just becoming an aesthetic issue, rather than life-or-death.

Another one (or two) bites the dust

On another side, we came to know and understand this problem before full production and whilst the majority of trees are still very young, which will lead to proper preparation for next year and to a bigger growth of the trees this year, since they do not have to feed all those olives (hopefully meaning more olives next year!).

Bue sky within

And all that happening before the olive fly even beginning its offensive...Which may give you an idea why organic is sometimes more expensive than "normally" grown food!

Still, working hard as there's less than 100 days to harvest. Looking forward to the dawn of that day!

Olive fruits - the missing, the missed, and the survivors (an early overview)

It's still quite early for a proper assessment of where this year will bring us, but few weeks after the flowers left place for the olive fruits we can give you some bits and pieces about where we're standing - we'll still have to wait for the end of the summer for any conclusions!

The leccino (which gives a quite balanced, gentle oil) has been a bit of a misfirer - lots of flowers but not that generous in fruits, maybe because the pendolino (another variety that is supposed to pollinate it) almost completely forgot to blossom. Here's how a branch of leccino is looking now:

Not really crowded!

Of the other varieties, the bianchera (which in contrast to the leccino, gives a peppery, spicy oil) is handling quite well. You can see from the below picture that the branches are well populated (the tiny dots close to the leaves!):

Probably a serious discussion going on...

Some of you may remember my earlier post on pests (excuse the pun) which sits just below this one: anyway, here's the link for the lazy. It turned out the little bug is causing problems: we released our team of specialists to chech the population:

Note the special net used by the young assistant!

And we found quite a number of those insects on our trees, which prompted us to spray some repellent on the trees. Here you can see what a catch looks like:

The insects are marked in red - the others are their victims

One is never happy to see them around in numbers, as in few days they decimate the still small fruits by piercing them to feed and breed (here's a picture of a sliced olive, few millimetres in diameter):

Piercing

What happens afterwards is that the young fruit, fatally wounded, dies - too early, too young. I'd rather see their glorious end by being poured, as oil, on a steak, rather than see them fall by the beak?mouth? of a small brown insect!

Anyway, we're doing our best to bring you a fantastic oil this year too, and the path to harvest is still long ...