Olives need a haircut too!

Been missing us? Sorry but at the moment we're in "all hands on deck mode" as it's pruning season! Take a look at the short video we made (actually worth one hour of pruning) to get an idea of how's life in Cadenela orchards right now...



Pruning is probably the most labour intensive activity (or at least on harvest level) and is necessary to have a healthy and productive orchard. Oh, and the trees look better after a haircut too :-)

Pedal to the metal!

I think this was the longest absence of updates on this blog since it's inception -  nature's decision to provide us with a rainy winter and a sudden start of spring, I'm talking to you...

Well, it's quite a busy period for us, having the backlog of late winter work to be cleared off the list (now done!) and all the usual spring duties compressed in half the usual time. We're keeping up, thanks for asking, and soon the tempo should be easier on us, and allow for some more regular reporting!

For those who may wonder what kept yours truly occupied, here's a little video (it's an hour of work compressed in few seconds)




To get a feel of the size of activities, just press play a few hundred times :-)

Olive pruning in Liguria - part two

Having dealt with the introductions in the previous post, I'll pass to the actual course experience.

Look, it tells you where to cut!

Really?

 Actually, I need to do some explanation first:

Olive pruning in Liguria - an overview

After quite some absence from posting (the reader will see why in the coming days), here I start with an initial report from a great experience made possible by the O.N.A.O.O. ( the italian national organization of olive oil tasters, link here).
 

The O.N.A.O.O. offices in Imperia (well, not all of the building...)

 Actually, it was not about olive oil tasting, but rather about

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:

News from the orchard

Yesterday during the routine check I noticed three generations of jasmine moth feeding on our young  trees. Not in all the orchards, but in a good half of them. There are some fat, green and big caterpillars almost ready to reshape themselves into moths, younger siblings in their teenage days, and barely visible youngsters of few millimeters in length. All enjoying a nice meal courtesy of the undersigned&family. It is quite a spreaded attack, so the plan was to spray them today, however the weather, windy and bearing an open promise of rain, does not seem to care that much about our needs. In fact, it is already some three weeks of english spring weather here: lots of wind, and raining every second day. Any intervention is therefore pointless, as the organic treatments need some time to produce an effect - a rain shower few hours after the application means having done a pointless effort. I guess sometimes one just needs to accept the facts as they are, since nature is not really into the wish-fulfilling business. You may have predicted many potential problems, tried to prevent them, worked tirelessly to achieve the best result, but yours is rarely the last word, having Ishtar/Gaia/Mother nature as interlocutor. It does however put the events of life, and one's influence on them, into perspective: anybody who has sailed through a proper gale or got caught by a storm whilst mountaineering will know that.

Anyway, Insha'Allah, in few weeks it will be harvest time!

The ladybirds are back!

Its pruning season and the gentle weather made yesterday's work look more like a stroll in the fields rather than actual hard labour. Whilst I was warming up and still lacking the necessary zen state of mind to concentrate on the intended activities, I noticed the first ladybird hiding behind a leave.

On the next pair of trees (before I started concentrating on the actual work I planned to do) I saw this couple

and this other one sunbathing

Now this is an almost completely different insect, although looking ladybird-ish

Whilst the ladybirds were pretty motionless, the black one was running around like it was looking for the car keys or something - it was a real treat having it hold steady for the few seconds I needed to take the picture.

Why to mention ladybirds in a blog about growing olives and making olive oil? Those little creatures are one of the best friend of the organic producer - they devour an amazing number of larvae and other small pests that we really do not want to feed on the olive tree and its fruits. On the other hand, if generic pesticides are used, the ladybirds get the lower hand together with the insects the pesticides were meant to eliminate. So, it is quite a honour to see them visiting us in such number and doing their pest control.

I've been told that the ladybirds are likely to stick around if proper housing is provided to them - one of the things we'll do this year is put some "ladybird condominiums" around the fields to see if it really works. Will put some pics when my daughter and me will start with the construction business!

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...