Take your olive oil to dinner this Christmas!

On an appetizer...

On a main...

Or on a dessert, why not?

Happy Christmas!

White olives?

Everybody heard about green and black olives, but what about the white ones?

Due to the content of my last post I can not honestly say that what I saw this morning surprised me, but it's still an unusual view:

Well, Insha'Allah, hopefully there wont be too many broken/frozen branches. Will take a walk tomorrow and see.

Weather forecasts...

If you live in a city and it's not a weekend, the weather has not a huge influence on your life. Of course, extreme events apart like floods, snowstorms or similar. But if you are on sea, be it leisurely sailing with your family and friends or shipping several thousands tonnes of crude or iron ore, it's another matter altogether.

Hokusai's take on rough weather

 Having a bit of sea experience myself, I have learned to keep a careful eye on the weather patterns and developements, so to plan and organize the life at sea in accordance with nature swinging moods.

A nice high pressure area and you can have a good quiet sleep at anchor!

But how does this translate to works in olive orchards? Here is a fresh example that is puzzling me at this very moment.

There's an approaching low pressure peeking which will most probably lead to rain and temperature drop over the weekend. Now, the temperature drop does not worry us if it is keeping itself at or about 0 degrees celsius, but it may be troublesome for the young olives if much lower, as the branches are still growing. The possible damage we are looking at is freezing of the branches - at least one year of growth lost - or even whole trees freezing and dying. There are biological solutions that can be sprayed on the leaves to prepare them for the shock and minimize the damage, but as with all biological therapies the timing is paramount.

 Google being our friend, a quick look at some serious weather forecast pages gave the following results:

FORECAST 1

FORECAST 2

FORECAST 3

As you can see, it is not even clear if it wil rain (or snow) Friday OR Saturday (we really can't spray anything whilst it rains...), let alone IF the temperature drop will be under 0, and if so when...

If only the Oracle of Delphi was still in business!

Oil trading, arbitrage and options...in ancient Greece

Here is a little piece of useless olive oil related info useable during a rainy day winter chat. Having a penchant for economics myself, lately I stumbled into an article about economy theories. There was a reference to Thales of Miletus - if at school you listened to your math teacher, this was the guy who measured the pyramids height with a stick on a sunny day. A practical, clever person one would imagine.

In this days of general malcontent with anything related to the financial world and their instruments, it is interesting to observe that similar techniques were employed in the early days of our civilization. As a necessary intro, it is worth mentioning that at the time olive oil had the same (if not larger) economic importance that crude oil has now for our society.

Thales, the story goes, predicted a generous olive harvest for the next season and negotiated a deal with the region's mills whereas he'd have a right to use the mills for a fixed sum. Harvest time come, Thales excercised his option and, if we trust the old story, made himself quite a fortune on the delta.

I bet his philosophy classes had a surge in attendances when the news spread out...

Arrived late at home today

Found traffic on the road...

Mars attacks! Earth fights back...

We've been pondering a plethora of options on how to minimize the damage caused by this family of insects.

A quite broad description of the damage, the menace and the palliative measures has already been given on this blog here, but for those who would like a quick reminder, the damage looks like this:

Otiorhynchus damage

Whilst the perpetrator has more or less (there are several types of them wandering around our orchards) this look:

The menace!

So, we ended with about one thousand trees with developement issues, and several tens dead . And obviously, hours and hours spent minimizing the damage. Whilst some plant infusions did have a repelling effect, those insects are active for several months and it simply was not possible to keep up with their innumerable forces on the field.

Finally, one option has been agreed as the (potentially) most effective whilst at the same time not disruptive or distructive for the orchard biodiversity,  not invasive,  not polluting, and not changing the soil chemistry. Too good to be true? I certainly hope not.

So what is this option on which we pose so much hope? Big roll of drums, it's a half millimetre worm. It's a member of the Nematodes gang: a brief and techy explanation here, and a more detailed and easy to understand here. To cut a long story short, those little guys search for the larvae of specific insects and parassite on them, thus eliminating the threat to our trees. Obviosly not all is that easy: we had to nail a narrow window of soil temperature, humidity, spray them fast as they do not swim that well, water the plants right away to push the nematodes underground... Here some pics of how it all looked:

Here are the little soldiers, kept at +8 degrees C

Now going for a swim

Stirred, not shaken...

Sprayed around the young trees...

Quickly watered in order for them to get underground...

A quick pitstop to load some more water...

On again...

Till the end of the day

And a nice sunset...

Now we have just to wait for spring and see if the nematodes worked their magic on the larvae of the leaves eating menaces! Fingers crossed...

Cold wind blues

She's cold, she's strong, and she's coming from the northeast. Some say she was born in the vastness of Siberia, and judging by her fierce gusts and biting coldness, it may as well be. It is the bora, the menace of our windrose.

The coldness, if she endures for more weeks, can freeze quite old trees, let alone the young ones. The gusts can take their toll on branches, and even eradicate trees. We had the first preview few days ago, and a torough check of the young tress and their supporting poles had to be done.

So far so good, a lotta shaking going on but no damage. Some tying up to be done here and there, but mostly small issues.

Since pictures in this case may not be descriptive enough, here are two short videos made during the control walk:





Good fun for sailing, not so much in the orchard!

The olive autumn

As one would expect, autumn brings a certain slowdown to the activities in the orchard, however not of the magnitude that would ensure a boring time to yours truly. The plants are still growing and pruning is still on the to do list, and there is a number of other things that need to be taken care of. Therefore I am quite neglecting to update you in the last few days, but here is part of what I promise to give you in the forthcoming days and weeks:

- an insight on the wind influence on the young plants

- a report on our latest try to minimize the negative influence of the insects I've been speaking about here

- some statistics and a field report on another enemy of ours

- last but not least, a preview of our logo, bottle, and label(s)!

Stay tuned!

An evening at the oil mill

The autumn days have their specific scents, with one giving berth to the other, each year, with the same regularity and predictability. It all starts with the southern winds bringing the humidity and saltiness much needed after the dry summer, perfumed by the flowering origano, lavender and pinetrees. The first autumn scents to take over the streets of my town are those of the fermenting grapes, later replaced by the bitter odour of the grape pomace during the grappa production. Later, at the time when the first chimneys awake after the long pause, and the burning wood slowly but persistently permeate each corner of the town, the olive oil mills come back to life with their dimmed sound, and the bitter smell of crushed olives takes control for several months. In the evening, sun already fallen, one would expect a small province town to fall even to quieter existance than usual. But it is then that the oil mills burst into life, with tens of vehicles bringing the harvest of the day, and many more passers by stopping and inquiring about who picked which cultivar, and check the looks and quality of the olives, all good starting points for a bit of conversation and why not, a glass of wine.

For some (to me) unfathomable reason, my 3 year old daughter is fascinated by the oil mills, so each walk we take in the evenings has to stop at one of the mills, where for about one hour she checks every stage of oil production, from the olives and their looks, to the taste of the final product. No need to say she is already a habitue' of our mills, promptly greeted by the mill workers. Which brings me to a necessary apology: the pictures that follow were taken with my daughter in one hand, and a pretty poor lightning, but anyway will give you an idea how the olives are processed and the olive oil is made.

Olives (bianchera, busa, leccino) stored in a 400kg box, waiting to be processed

Another box, probaby frantoio, looking at the colour and shape

And yet another, here we see the fruits of the bianchera cultivar

First stage: the olives start the process by being feeded to the washer

Empty feeder (with my daughter, we always have to wait here until empty...)

Washing time: the green shadows above the water are actually olives falling in the pool)

Nice and clean, the olives move on to the crusher

It may not look as much, but here is where the olives get crushed in a green/brown pulp

This is where the oil extraction takes place. The pulp is continuously mixed until...

...after filtering and separation, the oil makes the first appearance!

For those inclined in a more technical explanation, look here. I will follow up more in detail on oil mills later.

A harvest day

In the old times, speaking of olive harvest would bring to memory pictures of cold, wet, windy winter days spent picking olives either from tall tress, balancing on wooden ladders, or back-aching bent over the ground to pick the fallen ones. Frozen hands, painfully sensitive ears and noses tickled by the thin branches and hardened leaves.

As all things in life develop and change, so did also the logic of cultivation of olives and production of oil. No more tall trees to allow crops to grow in their shade, or late harvest to achieve the highest oil percentage at the mill*. The trees are kept lower to ease hand picking, and the olives are picked at the best time that enables to maintain the polyphenols high and produce the best quality olive oil.

Last Sunday was a truly beautiful autumn day, quiet and peaceful, one could almost feel the nature preparing for the winter rest and soaking up the last sunrays reminiscent of the summer. The night humidity deposited a thin layer of pearly droplets on the grass, leaves and fruits, so we had another coffe waiting for it to dissolve. Nets were then laid around the olives, and the harvest begun.

Morning in the orchard

Branches bent by the weight of the fruits

Somebody having fun on the net...

The literal fruits of one year's work

Harvest done for the day, now fast to the mill!

*That is technically not correct. Olives picked later (i.e. after the optimal period) do give a higher percentage of (lesser quality) oil, but this is because the olives have lost in weight due to several factors like transpiration and others...It also costed less to the farmer, as you pay the mill a certain amount per kilo of olives, not per litre of oil produced.

Olive oil, finally!

Harvest is over, time to prepare the orchard for the winter and ease a bit. Before I manage to get all the pics sorted, here's a quick preview of a year's worth of work:

The olives

And the oil - cheers!

A day in the orchard - olive pruning

Whilst waiting for the olive fruits to reach the perfect stage for picking, the work in the orchards never stops. One of the things that demand attention at the moment is the preparation of the young orchards for the upcoming winter. Humidity and strong winds may take their toll on the still not fully developed plants, therefore the need to prune the young trees.

The benefits of such activity are various: by opening a bit the branches, more air is allowed to circulate and thererfore smaller the chances of fungi infections (some info on the main troublemaker here). Another positive point is that less sail area lowers the chances of strong winter winds tearing apart  branches or the whole tree top. Lastly, we need to start and form the olive tree top in a multiple cone (that's a huge topic to discuss...).

Anyway, it's easier to understand when seen, so here are some pictures:

As you can see, there's a branch developing at ground level (we do not want that), and the tree top is a bit busy

After the haircut

Here we have an obvious imbalance, with one of the side branches taking over

As you can see here it is almost as thick as the trunk

End result

Before

After

Obviously, spending quite some time in the orchard gave me the chance to cath some pictures of the wildlife (the lower air temperature made them easier to shoot I must say)

A horn viper youngster, more info here

Obviously frightened by my presence, it hid under some vegetation

A dragonfly

And at the end of the day, I was given the chance to enjoy a beautiful sunset: