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Yesterday and today’s main topic of conversation: the hail storm of yesterday morning.
Fortunately the ‘grandine’ weren’t large enough to do serious damage, but we lost our entire pomegranate crop – both fruits. A grave disappointment. As well a struggling patch of late season lettuce was flattened.
It’s olive picking time again, and our neighbors have put up their nets. As you can see from the photo above, though, so far they have collected only hail, and plenty of it. Though it arrived yesterday morning, it is still in the nets this evening.
I was able to do our olive ‘harvest’ in about two hours today; this is the second year post-pruning that we have not had a crop. However, if you’re interested in reading about and seeing photos of our 2008 harvest, click here and here… We didn’t have a hail storm that year.
An Ex-Expatriate 
The grandine was such a great “welcome to Rapallo” moment for me!
Welcome to paradise! I’m catching up with your blog slowly – I want your closet – what treasures you’re finding. Don’t worry about the weather; it should improve in December. I hope.
Oh the hail will have done the locals olives no good at all! We can sympathise with you as we had a disastrous Olive Harvest this year,
I picked the few we had to add to a friend’s harvest – and I noticed lots of hail damage on the fruit – hopefully it won’t affect the oil…
an answer for David. Yes, the color means reapness. In this time of the year a great part of olives are ripe, and dark, a smaller percentage still green. Of course, they too have oil. This year however is a bit late, that’s to say olives are less ripe, and more attached to the branches. That should means more oil, as oil content increases with time.
Agostino, I noticed an awful lot of olives came off the trees in the high winds earlier this week. Do you know if the hail damage of a few days ago has any effect on oil production? It doesn’t seem sensible that it would, but… I wonder. Hope it is the great year that everyone says it is, and wish we’d had a full crop this year.
Louise, from your photos it looks like most of the olives you bring in for processing are quite dark and only a small percentage are green. I would have thought that since the “extra virgin” oil they sell here is tinted slightly green that a higher percentage of the raw product would have been green? The difference in color is attributable solely to degree of ripeness? Second, since you won’t get oil from the pits, what happens to the pits in the secondary processing? Ground, dried and converted into soil conditioner?
Actually, the oil is pretty much the same color no matter what color the olive skin is. The skins are part of the smutch that gets reprocessed/thrown out, and the dark skins don’t seem to affect the color of the oil within. I’m not sure what happens to the pits after all the smutch is hot-pressed; I imagine it probably is turned into some kind of soil enhancer, but I really don’t know – have never seen the hot press process… good thing to look into. Agostino answers your other questions…
Oh what a shame – no pomegranates nor olives.
Am thinking of having a funeral for the two pomegranates… did pick a few olives and gave them away.
Our area seems to be prone to violent storms. Obviously, you are too, since you are on the other side of the mountains from us. I often wake up to the sound of thunder rumbling through the mountains around us. What a pity about the damage.
We’re accustomed to a certain amount of rain at the appropriate time – but I’d be really surprised if we don’t go a lot over the average annual precip of about 52 inches – it felt like we had that earlier in the week! When we moved here we were told it snowed once every five years. It has snowed every year, and snowed five times last winter. And hail?? Bah!