Update from the olive grove: fire and insects (part one)...

Well, where should I start from? Our continuous checks are going on and probably in the next few days we'll have to battle the Jasmine Moth again. The fall in temperature and the rain of the last few days have been a blessing for our not so friendly cohabitant, and the population is slowly but steadily picking up from its normal number to proper mass scale invasion again.

Plus, we had two events, one of which is bad for sure whilst the other still needs to be assessed properly.

There was a number of wildfires sprouting here and there during the summer - one of the biggest in our region brushed our biggest orchards but few of the smaller ones were not that lucky. So far, we completely lost to the fire about 70 young trees, with at least twice this number being shocked by the temperature, but with some chance of surviving.

This is the view of the non cultivated land on the approachs to our grove:

Whilst this is how the burnt young trees look like:

The ones that we hope will survive look like this:

As soon as the firemen allowed us to enter, we proceeded to water the trees and sprayed them with a ferruous solution (thanks, algae!) which should help them in recovering from the shock. We'll see.