Pruning and logging.

What a difference over the last 4 days:  the clouds have gone, the sky is blue, the sun is shining again and it was a very pleasant 20 ish in the shade today.

Although some parts of Andalucia - especially around Almeria - are reporting structural problems with roads and bridges,  it's mostly coastal areas that seem to have suffered the most.  Maybe too much building on what used to be  land for the rain to soak into/run off ??  Who knows,  but lots of devastation and mud and clearing up and rebuilding to be done.

Here however we have spent the morning cutting down a very unproductive olive tree having decided it would be better used as firewood and maybe in years to come it might start to give us some olives again.  It had got very leggy and  twiggy and although we have a large pile of greenery,  not many olives to be seen. 

Since we've been here  the price of olives at the mill has gone from 89 cents a kilo down to 26 cents a kilo whereas the price of a gas bottle has gone up from 8 euros to 18 euros.  So it makes far more sense to cut  the wood for heating rather than pick for money /oil.  Last time we did an olive harvest, discounting the time taken driving to the mill and waiting etc, we earned 2 euros an hour !!!!!   Even if you take your olives as oil not cash, you have to pay for the processing .....  that works out at 2.50 a litre ...... the oil is from the cooperative not your own (unless you can guarantee 500 kilos at a time which we can't)  it's only about 11 or 12 euros  to buy 5 litres from the supermarket ....and without the work.  Olive harvest is very labour intensive for a few months,  whereas cutting for firewood can be done over a longer period of time.

We still have some logs to be split  ready for drying,  there's a good feeling when you hit the log just right and it splits, but I haven't got the knack and John has, so that's his job.  I stack them when he's finished.  I did try again today and managed to split a few but most just fall over as I don't seem to get the log splitter lined up right more than once on the same place.