For anyone who happens to be reading this and doesn’t know: I am practically obsessed with olive trees. We love green Tuscan olive oil and can hardly eat enough olives, but I really have a thing for the trees. Mort Rosenblum wrote an award-winning book called Olives -- The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit from which I will steal one of my favorite (food-related, at least) quotes:
"Olives, like grapes, are essential to any life worth living."
He goes on to say that any culture worth its salt is based on olives and olive oil. I think he's onto something. Consider the roots of Western civilization: ancient Greeks, Romans, Etruscans, Egyptians, Persians—everyone used olive oil not just for eating, but to fuel their lamps, anoint their athletes, make offerings to their gods—and then, of course, think about the traditional cuisine of most of Italy, Spain, Greece, parts of France, my house. OK, just kidding about that last part, but you would not believe the amount of olive oil we go through at home.
But back to my favorite trees. Here’s why I love them: first of all they’re gnarled and beautiful and every one of them is different and seems to tell a story. They’re almost human-looking in real life with crazy, expressive arms waving in the air.
They live for hundreds of years, though they will die back in a hard freeze, a devastating one of which happened in parts of Tuscany in the late 80’s. Some trees survived, depending on how well-protected they were; the trees in most of these pictures are just babies--between 30 and 50 years old.
This one, with so many trunks from the same roots, tells its own history and that of the local weather over the past few decades. The outer two trunks were probably allowed to grow when the main inner trunk seemed on the brink of being lost sometime 10 to 15 years ago.
Now perhaps you will understand why I’m pretty excited about my wwoofer work at this newest farm: my job every morning is to go out and prune the young olive trees. It doesn't hurt that I'm on the top of a hill with views like this:
Or that I have adorable canine companions like this:
After planting the new trees, this annual pruning is the next and only step for almost the first decade of life for these trees. Mom and I were lucky enough to see the preparations for planting brand new trees on the farm outside of Siena last week. In Spain this spring, my husband and I saw the olive trees in bloom and later tiny baby olives, smaller than peas, in Andalucia. In November three years ago in Tuscany we harvested olives, went to the mill to see it pressed, then brought home our very own olive oil. So, with this pruning, I’ve almost got the whole life cycle of my precious olive trees covered.
The trees on this farm must have been planted after they bought this place 8 years ago. The oldest trees are probably 6 or 7 years old, still "just bearing enough olives for the birds to eat" (that's per the local farmer). According to the duo of brothers who dug those holes for new olive trees, an olive tree doesn’t really produce until it’s 8 to 10 years old. Before that, starting around 4 or 5 years, it will bear some olives, but not worth to bother harvesting. And these two brothers have around 1800 olive trees, so I guess they know what they’re talking about!
Back to the pruning job: the oldest are starting to bear decent fruit, but part of the grove is on an open, unprotected hillside and some of the trees have died (or nearly) over the past couple of years. An olive tree is hardy, though; most of the trees that have died back above ground are producing new growth from the roots. That means my work ranges from cleaning up the sprouty mess at the bottom of a well-established tree to deciding which of the new shoots from a “dead” tree is the strongest to become the new tree and cutting back all the rest. It’s kind of an exciting responsibility!
For the former (that is, cleaning up an established tree), it means pruning the growth at the roots and along the trunk, as well as cleaning out the central part of the tree. Olive trees are pruned so that they never grow too tall to harvest; that means that three or four primary branches are encouraged to grow horizontally and should be kept fairly clean of all the “suckers” – at least that’s what my family calls those little tiny branches that sneak in between the main branches of a tomato plant and the central stem. Here's a Before & After.
I really haven’t been given any direction about what to do with the bigger trees, so I'm pruning them based on what I’ve read about olive trees and watching an older farmer complain about what should have been done to trees I saw outside of Florence. Since the two owners of this farm have only been at it for 8 years, they may not have too much guidance to give anyway: I need Antonio, the original owner of Podere Il Poggiolo (the agriturismo near Florence where Michael and I helped with the olive harvest). Antonio would have something to say about these olive trees, I’ll guarantee you. Even I know that they need more serious pruning than I would dare to do. Here's another Before and After; how am I doing?
(Notice the tree down the hill on the right, whose trunk isn't
distinguishable from the background in the Before picture.)
Another amazing thing about olive trees is that they can be neglected for decades, then with a good pruning can be made to produce again. There are several proverbs around the Mediterranean along the lines of “Make me poor, and I’ll make you rich” referring to the way olive trees thrive when they are pruned of the new growth (or older growth if they’ve been neglected), allowing the older parts of the tree to concentrate on making lots of happy, plump olives.
(A note to my devoted fans: I'm trying to catch up on the blog with things I've written over the past few weeks, but I'm posting them in the order in which they happened, so there are new entries mixed among the old).
