Christmas is looming! A number of you have ordered up for Christmas presents.
We still have bottles of the Gold award winning Batch T3. This is the robust batch.
For the medium strength extra virgin olive oil we have moved onto batch T5.
Shalumar is drying out rapidly, only one rain event in the last 6 weeks and quite a bit of drying winds.
The farm dam is visibly going lower, we pumped water onto the grove for 6 hours this last weekend.
Once the dam is down around a meter, we have to pull back on irrigating to keep the water for the cattle.
The summer forecast is for a La Nina, which should mean wetter conditions, but so far no signs of the lady.
Flowering seemed to go well, now trying to assess how fruit set has gone.
A few more weeks will tell the story more clearly, but it is probably going to be a medium sized crop.
Overall the trees look bonnie.
The fire risk is increasing, so doing lots of mowing and mulching.
We will have to mulch the grove soon to mitigate the this risk.
Best practice is to have a ‘wild’ grove, i.e. unmowed, but this has to be balance against fire risk.
But short of whipper snipping around the tree bases, it is hard to keep the grass under control around the trees themselves.
We just returned from the Australian Olive Association conference in Adelaide.
Lesson for us is our fertilising regime is spot on, but we do need to get back into regenerative pruning!
With trees about to turn 30 years of age, it is important to steadily take out the older limbs to encourage new wood.
The trees crop best on wood that is up to 10 to 12 years of age.
Pruning is easy, the hard part is picking up and putting the cuttings through the wood chipper!
So Christmas is coming, olive oil makes an excellent Christmas present, let me know if you need more.
Either email on shalumar01@gmail.com, or asmith51@bigpond.net.au
Let me know if any preference medium versus robust in flavour.
Regards Alan and Jocelyn