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!