New orchards - six months of work in two pictures

Although I was planning to call it before and after, looking at the "before" pics I see a lot of work had already been done - olive orchards, turned by neglect and lapse of time almost into a forest, had already been cleared of the mediterranean jungle of junipers, bushes and undergrowth. For the rest, I believe the pictures speak by themselves.

So, here is what has been done in the last six months in some of the reclaimed orchards (as alwys, you can click on the pictures to see them in detail):

before

after

before

after

before

 

after

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

As if the drought, the fires, the variuos insect attacks were not enough, something unknown got noticed some time ago in one orchard. The weakest young trees were consistently loosing leaves from part of the branches, which in some cases were (are) completely essiccating.

At closest inspection, the reason for the above seemed to be those small scratches/holes:

You can see here another branch, showing the same pattern:

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:

Planting started!

It was a quite demanding weekend, with the test planting taking place on Saturday (we still need to tweak a bit the operations to make them the most time-effective as possible). We had to basically

a) coordinate the Cat digging the right size holes (not too big, not too small) at the right place (downwind from the most stressful wind for the young olives, behind the supporting pole)

b) coordinate the people placing and tieing up the olive to the pole, covering the hole, placing the white textile on the trunk (it's a trap for non-winged bugs)

c) and water them

Since we worked the whole day I did not manage to take a lot of pictures, but basically here are the two rows we planted by noon (about 100 plants):

Of course, we still need to work a bit on the terrain, but there was no rain at all this winter so the ground is hard as rock!

Just FYI, the cultivar planted here is called Rossignola, tipical for this region (but I promise I'll develop on cultivars planted and on the different olive oil they produce later on!)

But it did not end there. We still have about two thousand plants waiting at home, and they have their needs too! So in the evening it was watering time -  I guess the olives were grateful

What's going on

View Larger Map

Sadly, Google Maps does not update the images of the area pretty often (it looks like we're in a forest), but as you can see from the video below it quite changed its appearance:



So, what's the Cat doing? It's sticking into the ground the poles that are going to support the young trees in their first years, until they manage to stay in place by their own means (just like with little kids...)
The poles are being placed in holes previously dug by the very Cat you're seeing, filled with a mix of organic fertilizer and soil (a little present to the new inhabitants, until they root themselves properly!).

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...