August to December 2013

August was a relatively mild month, temperatures fairly steady in the mid-30s C without any high spikes. The river ceased flowing on 10^th August which meant a cessation of irrigation. It has ceased for the last few years now, and I am beginning to expect that to be normal. The first few years we were here it was more reliable. Fortunately, having bought the tractor mounted sprayer as intended I was able to cart some water to the most susceptible olive trees – young ones bearing a heavy crop, and keep them from losing their fruit.

What a difference that sprayer has made. It was not off the tractor for over 3 weeks from when I bought it. I sprayed against weeds all along the tree lines in less than a day. It used to take me the a week with knapsack sprayers. I also had complete protection from olive fly and gafa with the first clean crop I have harvested.

I know many people are opposed to using chemical protection of crops, but there really is no alternative here. Neglected groves abound and they are a permanent source of spreading diseases and pests. A loss of table quality fruit and the resulting low oil yield from the damaged fruit that is harvested is simply not an option, so spraying is necessary. I used the sprayer too to clean up the edges of the tarmac drive where weeds, and particularly couch grass were beginning to damage the surface. It also proved useful in spraying in and around buildings against insects, as well as treating the goats for the same problems. Biting and sucking insects, as well as flies, are a great problem for livestock in the summer.

In the garden, we continued to harvest lots of gherkins and then a year’s supply of the peppers which were just beginning to fruit when I posted in July. They are indeed a welcome new crop and very pleasant. To save anyone checking back to July, Marconi Red is the variety we used. I only had nine plants, but they cropped for many weeks. It is not a big blocky pepper, but has a very small cavity and is easily prepared for cooking or freezing – so my wife tells me. I just grow and harvest crops, she does the rest.

The potatoes followed their usual form of not being particularly brilliant. The property just seems not to be suited to grow them. Mona Lisa definitely outperformed the Picasso – both potato varieties, nothing to do with art. I will try Mona Lisa again next year, and maybe something else new. I just cannot accept that with all my experience I am unable to produce our own potatoes for all year round supply. Those available in the shops are of such poor quality that we eat them much less frequently than we like, using rice or pasta instead.

The olive harvest was rather late with very slow ripening of crops around about. I was picking ripe fruits as I could because I knew it would take me too long if I waited for full trees to ripen. The days become shorter and rain always stops picking. I was storing the picked fruits in vats of water until I had sufficient to take to the mill, when we received a sharp frost on the morning of 21^st November. This was followed by a mild few days and then a string of frosts right through to 12^th December. The first one had damaged all the olives remaining on the trees so it became a race against time to pick them, whatever their state of ripeness, before they disintegrated. Our son and family were visitng for a week and I was almost finished, with only one remaining to be picked, a very old and very tall tree, close to the house on the west side, that acts as a sunscreen to the cellar entrance and shades part of the house too. The day after their arrival we finished the tree, with my son doing all the climbing. I did not purposely plan it that way but I was pleased not to have to spend an hour climbing amongst the branches. His wife and I took care of the lower fruit.

As expected the oil yield was very low because of the frost damage to most of the crop, Fortunately due to a total lack of insect and fungal damage the fruit had retained a reasonable amount of structure and was acceptable at the mill. After allowing for the miller’s 18% processing deduction we ended up with 10 kilos of fruit to the litre. This meant a production of one litre to approximately eight and a half kilos of fruit. Very acceptable under the circumstances. At first I thought I might have been looking at a loss of much of the unharvested crop, and if I had not sprayed the resultant lower yield of even the sound fruit would have been a disaster.

There are still a few days to go to the end of the year, it is raining as I type, and it is forecast to last into the new year, so the nights will be mild, but that long string of frosts has reduced the mean minimum for the year and this will not be a record breaker for temperatures. I do expect it to be in the top four though since we came here in 2003. The afternoon high for 31^st December will give me the final figure.