2025 Here we come!

Only four weeks into 2025 and our minds are whirring with excitement for the year ahead. 

We can’t believe we’re planning our Christmas fairs for December!  We love our Food and Christmas Fairs, actually I think Chloe and I spend most of our time chatting to all the lovely people that we meet.

But, we have so much to do before then…

Very soon we’ll be heading back to Italy, as Spring will arrive in force. 

Before the vines start budding it will be a race against time for Jerry, who will be working from morning until dusk pruning, and yet again, replacing more rotten wooden vine poles, all before bud burst. 

All 600 olive trees will need pruning, actually it’s 618! the last 18 are babies but will probably still need re-staking after the winter. 

I’ve given up thinking that I could prune the olive trees. Our lovely adjacent farmer (80+ yrs old) told us several years ago we’d be no good at it, “it has to be born in you” really what he meant was, we weren’t Italians, how could we possibly know how to prune olive trees…so now we have Diego!

Diego is a young farmer who has a small farm of his own. It’s an absolute delight to hear someone as young, talk with such passion about the land. He did such an amazing job pruning our trees last year, which we think helped give us such a successful harvest, and is now waiting for warmer weather before starting yet again!

As Jerry does the pruning I’ll start in the garden, hopefully everything has survived the winter temperatures, porcupines and playful wolves!

Italy here we come!