Pruning the olive trees

12 January, Janet picking oranges

We have enjoyed the warmest January of our lives, full sun almost every day and only three days when it rained a little. Nice enough for me to sunbathe after lunch several times!

Six of the seven orange trees which I resurrected two years ago are bearing good fruit now, so we have the privilege of squeezing fresh orange juice in midwinter again.

When we bought the quinta four years ago, one of the first jobs I did was to start pruning the olive trees. They are naughty trees. They try to become a bush by putting out shoots at their base and under the branches, and grow vertically strongly.

 However none of this is fruiting wood so it has to be removed before the tree becomes very messy, tall and unproductive. To me, a really good, easily harvested tree is doughnut-shaped. The lower limit is the height a goat can reach when standing on its hind legs, and the highest point is my reach from seven feet up a ladder.

 Once the olive harvest is over and the oil is pressed it is time to begin pruning them. It takes me over an hour to prune one tree. I work for five hours a day in January, which means it takes more than the whole month to do one-third of the 340 trees on the farm.

Over the last three years all the trees on the quinta have been thoroughly pruned once and trimmed later whenever time became available. The once-neglected lanky sixteen-foot plants are now somewhat shorter, wider and more sparse.

It is said that a bird can fly straight through a well-pruned olive tree. As this has happened whilst I’ve been pruning I assume my trees are fine now; my newly-pruned trees are nine feet tall with an open centre. A year later the evergreen olive will have bushed out to form a doughnut shape and will fruit on the new growth.

Three times in the past week different locals – unconnected – have said my pruning is nearly professional or that I really know how to prune well, so I’m very happy to have passed the local street-cred test!

 

Harvesting the Olives. Late November 2011

Janet picking peppers, 11th Nov.

 

This month the weather has been ideal for clearing the veg garden and gathering the olives. The sun has shone all day every day, with temperatures rising from eight degrees at 8am to twenty from noon until 5pm, sunset. There were only three days of rain.

 

 

 

Rained off, looking from the kitchen window across to the next tree to work on at the far left.

We generally take the tractor to the olive trees around 8.30 and are sawing out branches and combing the olives from the tree shortly thereafter. It is unhurried work and, with birdsong in the morning sun, very pleasant. We lay a green woven groundsheet on the earth to catch the olives as we strip them from the tree with a small hand rake, then we gather up the sheet and pour the olives into a plastic crate. Every three days we aim to prune seven trees and harvest seven crates of fruit, which clean up at about 100 kilos.

 During pruning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the fourth day I slowly pour the olives into a winnowing machine whilst Janet turns the handle. This shakes them through a wire mesh at the front where the leaves are blown off the mesh by wind created from four rotating blades inside the drum of the machine. The olives roll down a chute into the red barrow placed below it.

We thought we were working at a reasonable rate until we learned that a local team of four gathers that much in one afternoon. They use a machine which resembles a mechanised pair of clapping hands on a pole.

 

 

 

Commercially a tractor is used which shakes the tree and catches the falling olives in a large net which it spreads around the tree trunk. It strips a tree every five minutes, yielding about 150 kilos in an hour although no pruning is done.

We have visited our local olive press which has been closed for several years and is due to reopen next week. They require a minimum of 350 kilos for a single quinta pressing (olives from just one farm) so we are storing our olives in spring water until we have collected enough to produce our own oil straight from the press.

 

Our Party

Lighting the new BBQ for the first time

The builders have completed the barbecue now and our kids have gone home. Janet’s mum has arrived for a month’s holiday. Our friend D has wanted us to throw a party for ages – why not?

We invited thirty guests and the builders too, and I worried for days how I could do all the work. It would be impossible, so we sought the help of Narcisa and her husband João to sort out catering and seating. She reckoned we should do a proper sit-down meal and barbecue the meat. Three days later she took us shopping and we returned with 45kilos of meat, twenty litres of drinks in addition to tens of litres of our own wine, and ordered fifteen loaves from the baker. We would need plenty of charcoal. We went to the local charcoal-burners place but he wasn’t in. Later we made two more trips to catch him and buy our two large sacks of fuel. A young couple have just bought land near our village so we sought them out and invited them to our meal.

On Friday afternoon João and Joaquim (Ana Rosa’s husband) brought in trestle tables, benches, boxes of cutlery and the large communal barbecue. All other preparations could wait.

We went for our sack of bread first thing on Saturday and collected Narcisa on the way back ([pictured here making fifteen litres of Caldo Verde soup). Ana Rosa arrived at 9.15 and our kitchen became the ops base for the rest of the day.

 

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We made salads and marinades, prepared fifteen chickens and savoury rice.

At 11am I was ordered to light the barbecue, and a few minutes later Rosel  arrived to do the grilling, then João joined him. The assorted mouros and morcelas (black puddings) and chouriço were grilled for tasty hors d’ouvres, whilst the ladies were setting the tables. We were sooo glad that when I designed the conservatory and dining area they were separated only by a sliding glass partition – everyone would be seated in the shade.

Ten kilos of belly pork and ribs went onto the barbecue, then the chickens.Once the fish pasties were in the oven our guests arrived steadily. The whole event was running smoothly to an unknown (to us) clock;  these people have perfected the art of partying.

Rosel (on the left) and Joao - the Main Men

Someone fried the beanburgers I’d made for Janet’s mum and the new English couple (vegetarians). Most guests had brought a dessert (bringing the choice up to eight now!) or wine, JJ’s mum brought two homemade sheep’s cheeses, and the whole party  went smoothly with excellent company and unlimited food and drink.

Our meal ended in mid-afternoon and, as we have no lighting in parts of the house yet, all thirty-odd of us reconvened in D’s quinta, taking the food and drink with us, to continue in the evening with dancing until 11pm.