Concentrated olives

We spent yesterday pruning olives - that sounds quite genteel doesn't it?  But in reality it involves lots of chainsawing, with  large chunks of wood rolling down onto the pista or getting stuck in the plants that grow on the banking below the olives, the  branches then need to be cut off the chunks, and even the smallish ones cut and stored as starter sticks for the wood burners next winter and eventually what you are left with are huge heaps of  leafy ends.

We stopped at that point yesterday and this morning started burning the leafy bits.   Yes, we have a chipper, but it needs fuel and with the pista in such an uncertain state it seems silly to be using spare fuel for that.  We may need it for something more important so decided to have a bonfire instead.   The license to have a fire runs until the end of the month, after that if we still have trimmings we can use the chipper if we need to.

We seemed to have an enormous pile or two of trimmings but just over an hour later - well, that was it!  But 10 hours later, at 9pm we went out to rake over the ash and found it was red hot still.  Should have done some jacket potatoes in the embers this evening!

J has just read this and said if I'd written it tomorrow, I could have called it "Ash Wednesday"