Tag Archives: olive trees

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

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.