Olives

Tuesday Oct. 22 2012

I arrived by train to Puglia to the town of Carovigno on Sat.  I was greeted by Gianni (73) who looked more like 60.  I was introduced to my roommate, Heli from Finland (red hair, blue eyes) at the apartment I will call home for the next 7 weeks,  It is right in town about 20 ride by car from the olive farm.  The website there is   www.ipoderidelsole.it    During the Summer it is a popular vacation place with 7 individual houses for rent amidst the olive trees and many, many fruit trees and flowers.
Gianni and his wife, Grazziola are my hosts and live next door to us in town where we eat all our meals lovingly prepared by Grazziola.  During the Summer months Gianni and Grazziola live in one of the houses at the farm.  There are 1200+ olive trees, all grown organically and at the end of the olive oil season produce 2000-2500 liters of oil.  I will never buy NON-organic olive oil again.  I am learning so much about growing organically but more importantly how non-organic fruits and veggies are grown.  Gianni says his neighbors with olive farms spread poison on the olives and in the ground to produce more oil from perfect olives.  I started to pick the olives from the baby olive trees today and I can easily say there were next to no non-perfect olives from his trees.  He has 12 varieties of olives.  It is also important to have at least 100 different varieties of fruit trees and flowers amongst the olive trees to be truly organic.  The good bugs eat the bad bugs and thus create a perfect organic farm.  This I put very simply for a much more complex environment.  I got to walk through some of the densely populated gardens to see huge sage, rosemary, morning glory, bougainvillas, roses, begonias, fig, grapefruit and on and on and on.
Yesterday, my first day of work, we laid 12Mx12M nets under the olive trees.  It was  physically very hard work.  I started at 8 a.m. and stopped at 1:30 to be taken back to Gianni's apartment for lunch.  After cleaning up the dishes we were off for the rest of the day.  Today we washed the plastic bins for the olives and then started the 'picking of the olives' from the very young trees.  Tomorrow we will continue picking olives.  Some of the trees are 700+ years old and each have a distinctive look with their huge, twisted trunks, each unique and look like a piece of art.  Beautiful.
The 5 liter can of organic extra virgin olive oil sells for $40 Euro and is shipped all over Europe-not U.S. because customs is too difficult.  Gianni only puts up salted and cured olives for table use for himself only.