Winter Orchard Maintenance

What goes on at a farm during the winter? Whenever it’s not raining we need to be out in the orchard making sure that the trees are in good shape. Strong winds hit Lake County frequently during winter storms and our young trees in the new orchard took a hit this year. This weekend we spent re-staking and re-tying about 80 trees. Some needed the strength of T-posts to get them back to an upright position and firmly planted in the ground again.

Once we get tools put away from that job, we get out the clippers and pruning shears and begin to sucker the trees. Once the weather is a little warmer Rich gets serious about pruning the trees with his sawzall.

Starting in March, we will be checking every week to see if budding has started because then it will be time to apply an organic foliar spray to the old orchard to encourage fruit development.

Not Enough of a Good Thing....

Alas, for fans of our 2018 oil, we’ve sold out! We had a smaller production year for our olives, which was true of olive harvests throughout California in 2018. We also had instant demand once we bottled oil because 2018 was an especially fine oil. We are doing everything we can to ensure we have a good harvest next fall so we have enough for everyone. We’ll be experimenting with an organic foliar spray for the first time. We’ll let you know here and on Facebook when our 2019 oil is ready.

Harvest 2018 - Another year rolls around

After a year of many challenges from nature: two fires in the county, one of epic dimensions; unusually long spells of hot weather; and a certain amount of anxiety over frost levels we arrived on harvest day to find beautiful, sunny weather welcoming over two dozen friends and family who came to help us with the harvest on Saturday, November 3rd.

We used electric harvesters for the first time ourselves to comb the olives to nets below. After a couple of more years of practice we should be professionals.

We celebrated our harvest that night with a dinner in our neighbor’s barn. Dancing Poly Farm did a superb job of catering our festive occasion. Early next morning it was off to Chacewater Olive Mill to press our olives.

Spring 2018 Tree Planting

We’ve finally finished planting our 9 plus acres of olive trees! Victor Silva, all-around farmhand, planted the last trees brought up from the Bay Area home nursery. He’s been working over the past four weeks to set in the newest 250 trees. Irrigation is turned on and the baby blue grow tubes adorn the newest trees. We discovered a black bird nest in the miniature forest of new trees we’d set by the barn before planting. We devised a fake tree with field fencing and olive tree prunings and carefully moved the nest. The transition was successful and we’ll see in about a week how many baby birds hatch from the six speckled eggs.

The 2017 Harvest Year

Every year up until 2017, we’ve had friends and family gatherings to harvest our crop. After a couple of mornings of handpicking olives into our harvest buckets, we were done and ready for celebration with food and drink.

This year, our trees have matured to the point where the harvest was more than our friendly, communal gathering could handle. Enter Milagros Castro and her harvest crew. After a long day of work on a chilly November 18th we drove our nearly two tons of olives to the Chacewater Olive Mill, where the olives were milled into oil that night.