Category Archives: olives

Poor, Sad Olives

19 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by in Food, Gardening in Italy, Italian food, Italian gardens, olives, Rapallo, Weather

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Speedy and I were pretty happy this spring as we watched the olive trees blossoming – it looked to be a good year for olives, something we haven’t enjoyed for the last four or five years.  Then came the summer that wasn’t. Uncharacteristically cool and wet, the hot dry days we expect in July and August never materialized. For the first time since we’ve lived here I did not have to water the gardens at all.

The olives didn’t like it. The first problem is an annual problem, but one that has never been as bad as this year: the Mediterannean fruit fly.

Photo by Jack Kelly Clark, courtesy of University of California

Photo by Jack Kelly Clark

This little stinker, only about 1/4″ long, has an ovipositer that allows her to deposit her eggs in ripening olives. The maggots that hatch dine on the meat inside the olive until they are ready to burrow out, leaving behind a black and mushy mess. We’ve always had some fruit with the tell-tale dots that show an egg has been laid. This year we’ve had ample evidence that the larvae flourished. Why they were more successful this year than other years I don’t know; I think I’ll blame climate change.

bad olives-001

Two other problems, certainly climate related, are a kind of rusty growth on the fruit that is called either anthracnose or soft nose. I don’t know enough about either of these conditions to know which has affected our olives; I just know that either one leaves the fruit completely damaged and useless.

Fruit showing both the rusty disease and puncture wounds from egg-laying

Fruit showing both the rusty disease and puncture wounds from egg-laying

Usually at this time of year, if we are having a good year, we are dragging out nets, olive rakes and sheets for our own particular style of harvest. (You can read about our harvest by pressing here and here.) This year there is no point.

bad olives-003Many of the olives have turned dark prematurely and have fallen off the trees on their own. There’s no telling what quality of oil might lie within the few hardy individuals that are still clinging to the trees. We’re not going to invest the not inconsiderable time and effort to find out.

Ours are not the only trees thus affected. We have heard from friends that no-one in our part of Italy has an olive harvest this year. This is a pity for those of us with trees, but it’s a misery for the people who have the business of pressing olives. They will have few customers this year. Fortunately for olive-oil lovers, we have also heard that the crop in the south is excellent this year. With luck they will pick up the slack for those of us in the north.

One thing that never seems to die is hope – and I just know that next year will be the best year ever for olives.

Poster courtesy of Santa Clara Design

Poster courtesy of Santa Clara Design

A Sorry State of Affairs

08 Saturday Oct 2011

Posted by in Gardening in Italy, Italian gardens, olives, Uncategorized

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No I’m not talking about Prime Minister Berlusconi’s latest schenanigans… I wouldn’t know where to begin (besides, then I would have had to call this post ‘Sorry Affairs of State’).  I’m talking olives:

Our friend R says the heavy rain of a couple of weeks ago damaged all the fruit.  Our friend E says that insects are the culprits.  As I’m much more diplomatic than our Prime Minister, I’m going to say they’re both right; and whatever the reason, there is no usable olive crop for us this year, or for anyone else we know.  The aforementioned R, who is famous for taking 95 kili of fruit from one tree last year, says he’ll be lucky to get a quintale (100 kili) from his 80 + trees this year. I don’t know if he’ll bother.  We have only about 15 trees, and many of them have no fruit anyway, so it would be a complete waste of time for us to harvest.

It’s a pity, because we look forward to the fun of harvesting and then going to the frantoio with friends and watching our very own olive oil come out of the machines (you can see the process here).  But this year it’s not to be.  We’ll hope for better luck next year, with the olives AND with the Prime Minister.

The Balmy Riviera…

11 Thursday Nov 2010

Posted by in gardening, olives, Weather

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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.

Olive Oil

29 Tuesday Dec 2009

Posted by in American habits and customs, Food, Health and health care, Italian habits and customs, olives

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Olive Oyl/King Features

We didn’t have a TV when I was growing up (I know! but it’s true!!).  But my best friend Taffy had one, as did other friends, so somehow stray bits and pieces of TV-lands-and-people crept into my brain.  One of these was Popeye and his interestingly shaped girlfriend Olive Oyl.

In fact, I knew this crowd pretty well from the daily comic strip in the North Adams Transcript (Popeye first appeared way back in 1929, and King Features still presents the strip, the creation of Elzie Crisler Segar. Interestingly, Robin Williams’ first movie role was in the 1980 film adaptation (Jules Feiffer, Robert Altman) of the cartoon). I never cared much for Popeye.  Unable to see the kind, generous and lovable character behind his ‘coarse’ speech and fightin’ ways, I avoided him and his cronies (Wimpy, arch-rival Bluto, etc.) for the more mundane Peanuts and Archie.  Talk about Wimpy!

As far as I knew back in those days, olive oil was a misspelled character; we didn’t know anything about olive oil in the mid- to late-20th century New England kitchen, and we certainly didn’t have any in the cupboard.  That all changed sometime in the latter part of the century as Mediterranean cuisine became popular in the States, both for its deliciousness and for its health benefits.  In fact, worldwide consumption of olive oil grew substantially, from 1,779,000 MT in 1990 to 2,553,000 in 2005. Suddenly restaurants were offering little saucers of oil for dipping bread, and connoisseurs were comparing flavors and production methodologies.  Olive oil became a low-key cooking and eating craze. (If you’d like to read an account of our own olive harvest, click here and here.)

Hirts Gardens photo

Italians have been cooking with and consuming olive oil from the year dot. Perhaps it is just their good fortune that natural circumstances gave them a fat product from a tree rather than from a cow. 1 tablespoon of butter contains 12 grams of fat, 8 of which are saturated (bad!) and it has 33 mg of cholesterol; 1 tablespoon of olive oil contains 14 grams of fat, only 2 of which are saturated, and it has no cholesterol at all.  In addition, olive oil contains antioxidenats, beta-caratene and vitamin E.  AND it tastes great and makes everything else taste great too.

Imagine our surprise when we received the wonderful Puritan’s Pride catalog the other day, and discovered that you can now buy olive oil in softgels.  Why on earth would you want to when you can buy a lot of olive oil in a bottle and have the pleasure of consuming it on salads and in sauces?  Pills??  Only, I think, in America! Then consider the economics of the thing.  You can get 300 60-mg softgels of olive oil (just writing it makes me shake my head) for $21.98.  That’s 10 ounces of olive oil for $21.98 – kind of pricey, if you ask me.  In fairness, the same catalog offers a 16 ounce bottle of cold-pressed organic extra-virgin olive oil for $9.63, as well as an olive leaf complex.

photo from China Suppliers.com

It makes me think of all the Futurama stuff we read about when we were kids watching Popeye – we would all zip around with personal jet-packs, and we wouldn’t have to eat food anymore because we’d be getting all our nutrients from pills. What a horrid thought that is! My advice? When in Rome, or anywhere else for that matter, do as the Romans – use lots of olive oil, but use it from a bottle, not from a softgel!

(More info on olive growing and harvesting here and here, and a photo album of the harvest and pressing here.)

Ouch

15 Friday May 2009

Posted by in gardening, olives, Uncategorized

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Last year was a banner year for olive oil production.  We got more than we ever had before, and so did a lot of other people.  Since last year was so good, no one had very high expectations for this year, which made this winter a fine time prune the trees.

Olives love to be cut back.  In fact, the more you cut off, the more they seem to like it.  Our friend Richard, who has taken a course in the care of olive trees and is therefore our guru for all things olive, tells us that olive trees can move more than 30 meters over the course of a century.  Frequently when a trunk gets thick or a tree goes too long without tending, the contadino will simply cut down the tree several feet above the ground.  A new mirror-1shoot will shortly grow on the side of the remaining trunk, and that will eventually become the tree.  After a time it too will be too old, will be cut down, and will produce another – it’s kind of like looking at yourself in a mirror, in a mirror – the images recede seemingly forever.  So too the olives march away from the original tree. (It’s harder to take a picture of this than I imagined.)

Which put me in mind of  Macbeth, who was told by an apparition in Act IV Scene i,

Macbeth shall never vanquished be
Until Great Birnam wood to High Dunsinane hill
shall come against him.

I guess if he’d lived in Italy instead of Scotland and Birnam wood was full of olive trees, it really might have arrived finally at High Dunsinane. But it would have taken far longer than the time Macbeth had available.

How bad can an olive get?  If left untended they can grow 20 or 30 feet tall.  Frequently vines and other opportunistic plants will attack them – though nothing seems to actually kill an olive tree.  Here’s a picture of a group of trees up the road from us which haven’t been touched for years, and which are bound up with ivy:

unpruned olives

pruned-olives

This is what some of our trees look like in their pruned state.  Pretty pathetic, isn’t it?  But you can see the younger one to the right of the older one in the foreground.  It’s on the move!  Looks like it’s headed for our neighbor’s property.  But he pruned his trees this year, too, so maybe eventually some of his will arrive on our land, and it will be a fair trade.