Work in progress!

Before I start with the whos, whys, wheres and hows I thought about showing you what is actually going on in the fields at the moment.

Basically, in addition to the existing plantation (about which I'll talk more later), we started salvaging fields which were out of use for at least 60 years (to make a long story short, a border region changed hands and the new rulers had a different idea on how to run the show, resulting in a fairly numerous part of the population leaving for better shores, whilst the ones remaining were disincentivated in cultivating the land left behind).

You can guess that 60 years took their toll on the looks of the countryside, with woods growing where once fields and olive growths dominated the landscape. Here's an aerial shot courtesy of Google:

Thanks to Mr. Caterpillar, Mr.Chainsaw, Mr.Deere and a number of working hours this very same piece now looks like this (shot taken from the macadam road in the picture above):

whilst similar fields now look like this:

As you can see, a number of old olive trees survived the abandonment, and are now getting a vigorous haircut which should bring them back to old glory in few years:

before

 and after

Obviously ther are not enough old trees to fill all the voids, so Santa took his truck and brought us some young siblings of the above trees to make them company in the coming decades:

Last year's effort resulted in this in one of the fields that we took back again from mother nature (you can see in the back the woods - the field looked like that one year ago):

By the summer, some 3,500 trees will be planted and the once neglected fields should get a drastically improved look. And, most important, will not be sprayed with chemicals that IMHO do more damage than good.

I have a bit of back pain whilst I write this, but judging from the upcoming activities I guess it will not improve that much :D

But it feels good in a strange way - much better than the open plan office I am sitting in right now!

Will keep you updated with the activities...