Olive Oil Adventure

On the 15th and 16th of November, we completed our Arbequina harvest in Sutter county. These tiny olives pack an awesome and very unique flavor. To make them even better, they’re quite easy to harvest! The branches tend to hang down, so you just wrap your fingers around the branch (loosely) and pull towards your belly bucket. The olives rain down into the bucket (causing much delight).

Our crew was a little slow and the fruit was only in spots, here and there. The weather was gorgeous, albeit a little warm for this time of year. Once again, a t-shirt and shorts would have been appropriate apparel for the day.  So, now to the totals: 1075 pounds.

On Saturday and Sunday, we took a small crew to Sutter county to harvest the tiny and ultra-flavorful Arbequina olives. We pulled more than 1100 pounds of fruit off of the trees while the sun shone brightly. The weather was per-fect and allowed for us to harvest in our t-shirts! It’s a rare occasion when that happens.  Typically, it’s cold, windy and very wet. Not a bad start for the 2008-2009 harvest!

Verde will be available in small quantities starting 11/17!

It certainly looks that way. All of the downed limbs are due to recent pruning activities around Sylverleaf. We are aiming for a very heavy pruning of all 9 rows in Block 2 of the orchard, consisting of about 230 trees and a light pruning of another 300.  So far, we have moved through three of the 9 rows (51 trees). Our efforts to prune have been severely dampened by two completely uncontrollable factors this year; wildfires and heat.

The wildfires are somewhat nearby and we’re completely covered by a dense layer of smoke. It’s great if you like that “campfire” smell, but after two weeks, I think that it’s getting a little old… If we stay outside for too long, or if we are working hard physically, that little itch starts in the back of the throat. Soon, the itch turns into a little cough here and another there. The chest tightens. The nose and eyes water. That’s all fine with me, but it’s the following day that I truly feel the effects. The cough is gone, but the back of the throat is a bit raw and there seems to be a hand around my upper chest and lungs. It doesn’t go away either…

The second problem is the heat that we have experienced lately. The daytime temperatures have hovered at or above 100F for more than a week. It’s quite unusual to have that kind of heat this early in the summer. We expect it in August or September, but June and July?! All physical work must be finished by 1PM or 1:30PM or heat stroke becomes a real possibility.

We haven’t yet planted our latest batch of 100 trees, but we’re moving in that direction. We picked the trees up from our favorite nursery in 2″ pots. They were woefully rootbound and nearing their end… We transplanted all of them into larger 4″ pots where they will now grow for a month or so. Then, it’s on to 8″ pots and finally into the ground. That should happen late in the summer when the weather is a bit less, uhm, HOT. This set of trees is made up of more Picual, more Arbequina and some lovely Hojiblanca (thanks to Jaime!) varieties. All of these varieties are tasty and should blend in just fine (Southern Spain Style, Yeah!).

It’s true.

I can hardly believe it, but Paradise is currently being evacuated… I don’t mean to make light of the situation, but this must be the end of the world.

The tiny town of Paradise, CA was evacuated a few days ago due to raging wild fires. It is a small, hip town, located in the center of olive country. We would like to wish everyone up there the best and hope that losses are minimal. Stay safe.

We have been running non-stop lately. With the warmer weather comes the daily grind of chores in and around the orchard. Everything is growing quickly and profusely and we struggle just to keep up.

The olive bloom is finished for this year. The bloom was very strong with large bunches of flowers on the end of each twig on the tree. I don’t recall any previous flower set that could compare with this year’s. (Well, two years ago, the bloom was very nearly as good, but the weather took that bloom far too quickly.) There are already tiny olives developing on the trees as I write this. Many are about 2mm in diameter and growing quickly.

The weather, especially the harsh wind, has been rather unpredictable this year. The timing for the recent rains and our mini heat wave were right in the middle of the bloom, so we’ll see how the crop set goes. If I had to guess, I’d say that we’re in for another small harvest…

Mother Nature sure is making this difficult.

This spring was looking to be one of the nicest that I can remember. The temperature has been a near perfect 75F with only puffy clouds in an otherwise blue sky. In fact, it has been so nice that we need to get the irrigation system up and running as soon as possible.

Mother Nature was just playing with us. The temperature went from 87F to below freezing in less than two days… Many of the local tree crops, such as almonds, prunes and cherries were severely damaged. Some farmers will not even be able to harvest their trees this year, since the small and developing fruits froze and are now falling from the trees.

We thought that we escaped any damage, but now we can see that’s just not true. There are tiny, not yet fully formed olive flowers that should be a healthy fluroescent green color. They’re brown and shriveled. It still might not affect the crop more by more than 20%, but it’s not good news. Only time will tell if the damage is significant, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed.

I hope that you can discern the good flowers and the brown, wilted flowers on this branch…

This past Sunday, Gene and I arose, prepared to spend the majority of the day picking olives. The day before, Saturday, we picked all day and I have to admit it was a bit too cold for my liking. The fingers get soooo cold, making the olive branches (and leaves) even more treacherous. But Gene is getting more familiar with his hand-held harvester, and all of the fruit is getting picked-primarily by us (or by him I should say!).

Sunday morning felt even colder than the day before. Gene heads outside at about 8:00 to get started. About 10 minutes later, he’s back in the house, looking for tools. Battery problems with the machine. This is not a good start. Secretly, I think, “oh, darn-nit, no picking”. Gene figures out that the problem was actually in the wire itself-it was shorting out. “No time messing with that right now” and off to the mill he went with a half of a bin of lovely olives. You can imagine there was a great sense of relief watching my honey and my olives drive away. Ah, but there are plenty of other ways to spend our day-like planting (finally) our remaining 20 baby olive trees.

On December 16th, exactly six weeks after the baby Picuals were put in the ground, 20 Arbequinas were planted. Once again, Mother Nature gifted us with rain for the new trees-how nice! What we can’t figure out is, where the heck did the last six weeks GO? If anyone knows, please clue me in…