Pruning…the start of our Olive Oil year

It’s March and the beginning of our Olive Oil Year.

Since October, when we harvested our trees, they’ve had time to enjoy a well deserved rest over the winter.

We’ve had several cold snaps, hopefully cold enough to kill the little olive fruit fly larvae, lying dormant in the bark just waiting to hatch and munch its way into the developing olives. But now it’s time for the trees to be pruned, this is the only stage of our EVOO production that we don’t get involved with, apart from clearing away all the prunings, which there’s a lot of!

The reason for this…we’re not Italians!

Our lovely elderly neighbour told us this some years ago, as we weren’t Italians we could never learn how to prune our olive trees properly.

We actually knew what he meant, it’s a technique handed down through generations, how could we learn a skill that runs through the blood of Italian families?

So now we have a young Italian farmer doing our pruning, using skills passed down to him through the generations of his family.

Pruning takes place twice a year, the first is called Dry Pruning, which is anytime between January to April.

This is when the real hard pruning takes place, the weather has to be dry and not too cold.

The second pruning is during the summer, and is called the Green Pruning, at this time any suckers are removed from around the trees, together with any rogue branches that have sprouted, olive tree branches have a will of their own.

Before starting to prune a young tree it’s important to decide on the shape one wants it to have in the future.

This varies throughout the olive oil world, one of the most popular within the Mediterranean countries is to achieve a tree with its branches forming a vase shape, or a cocktail glass shape as it is sometimes called.

To achieve the shape, three or four lateral branches are grown to form an almost perfect vase shape. The branches are not too high, for easy picking and the centre free from branches, allowing air to flow through, this helps prevent the formation of mildew and allows the sunlight to penetrate the olives as they grow.

We used to have a little panic when we saw so much being pruned off the trees, they looked so bare and hard for us to imagine the trees full of olives…but of course, they were pruned by an Italian who knew exactly what they were doing! By the following October the trees were full of beautiful olives ready for picking.

So, now we just do the clearing up, followed by the best job ever…giving each individual tree a good helping of manure. We love our trees and owe them the unpleasantries of having a smelly couple days as they give so much in return.

Oh, before I forget, we are allowed to do the Green Pruning, we can’t do any harm cutting back suckers !!