2 out of 3.....

They do say that 2 out of 3 isn't bad,  but when it's relating to your olive harvest - or lack of olives to harvest - I don't think it's good at all.  Last year we had a very small harvest and the year before they were full of the olive fly and those olives that managed to hang on to the tree till January, then got blown off in the winter winds.  This year  about two thirds of them are shrivelled and infected with the fly.  They don't stay on the tree long, the mill won't take them off the floor, the quality of oil is not good - the acidity is too high - so another year with no oil.

We do have some trees that are of a different variety, small trees but big olives, excellent for brining and they ripen much earlier.  So at the end of October/beginning of November I picked enough to refill the spaces on the shelves.  Last year I did half with garlic in the oil but they didn't taste that much different so this year they are just all in oil.  The oil isn't wasted, it gets used in cooking, as does the oil from storing the dried tomatoes.

Having said that, the oil from the local mill is not ours, it's a cooperative, and it's just as cheap to buy oil when on offer at the supermarkets as to work like mad for a couple of months, take the olives to the mill, pay for the processing and then find extra virgin on offer for the same price but without the work.  As they say, that's a no-brainer.  We still need to prune to get the firewood but without picking off the olives, it's a quicker job and can be done at a more relaxed pace, not when the mill is open.

None of this is good news for the mill though, last year they said that the less people harvest due to the low cost of buying oil,  the less people  live on their land and tend to it, the less production there is........the less likely it is they will be able to continue opening the mill.  It's a family run business  and has been for a long time.  Sad if it comes to that but where's the incentive to pick them?  One of our neighbours did his last week, the lorry came up from Yator to collect the sacks of olives,  he took his harvest as oil but for 30 cents a kilo, is it really worth doing it for money?  To put it in perspective, it works out at about 2 euros an hour.

But for firewood, it is worth pruning.  We've  found that the drier that we use in summer for tomatoes, figs etc is very good for rapid drying of wood. This time of year it's  empty but still hot from the  sun and wood starts to dry and split within a couple of weeks.  Handy to know just in case winter should arrive before we are fully re-stocked.