Hi Friends of Flatlands,
Pruning is wrapping up. Days are drying out. Spring is a time for reflection at the farm.
On the farm
Harvest time gets the headlines. It’s glorious and rewarding: fresh green oil trickles out to fill waiting tanks. It's exhausting, demanding immediate and full attention as olives continue to ripen and the calendar ticks toward possible frost. It is hard to look past harvest, so we forget that it’s followed by Pruning. The deadline to finish pruning is squishier. We need to have prunings on the ground, in neat rows, before the chipper comes through and before the trees flower, pushing energy out into branches that we don’t want to then cut off.
Pruning is time-intensive and hard work. But it is also a wonderful time to be in the grove. Hills to the west are popping – vibrant green as the grasses wake up. Sunny days bring out owls, hummingbirds, baby praying mantises. Following rain, mushrooms push up, tiny and red or lumbering brown.
During pruning, there’s time to look at the olive trees. Really look at them. Pendolinos, the universal pollinators, have vertical waves in their bark and disorderly branches that drape and cross over one another. Moraiolos have graceful branches that go straight up. Leccinos seem more prone to gnarl and surprise you than do the Frantoios. Or maybe we just haven’t quite figured them out yet.
Learning to prune is learning to see the future. As you look at branches, you have to picture where the coming fall’s fruit will be. Olives grow on second year branches. We need to imagine the harvesting pole in hand and figure out where olives will be hidden or inaccessible. Patches of soft, black olives left in the tree point to areas that are good candidates for removal - so do last season’s bird nests. We ask: which gaps in the canopy will be filled over the course of the spring and summer? which branches will get taller? which way the sun will pull the tree? And then we must make decisions about what to take out, hoping that the tree will respond as hoped to the new gaps and structures.
Each season foresight gets a little stronger. Each year we have a new and richer dataset: we can see what happened in response to last year’s decisions, and what happened 2, 3, 4 years downstream. And like with teaching (and probably any profession), each year’s experience lightens the cognitive load and lessens the overwhelming feeling of so-much-to-remember, so-much-to-figure-out-all-at-once. There comes a point in teaching when you can start to see the students instead of the class. With pruning, you begin to see the trees instead of the forest. It is at this point that advice you’ve gotten from mentors (if you can remember it) finally starts to make sense.
Diviner's tools: loppers, chainsaw, pruning saw, polesaw, pole pruners, gloves, knife.
Vision gets better, but like with anything, what you see (future or otherwise) depends on your tools. When pruning with a chainsaw, you look two years into the future and study parts of the tree closer to the ground. Small branches are excluded from perception. With clippers, you see the inner workings: eyes find things out of place and follow a winding branch back to its source. You picture the coming fall, trying to maximize yield and harvestability. With the new pruning saw, you can throw a leg up and pull yourself into the middle of the tree and look out, light coming through the branches from all sides. It’s best to make a pass with each of these tools, but time is short and sometimes one predominates. Sometimes it’s also nice to change things up, leave the chainsaw off for a day to hear the birds, frighten fewer lizards, and get a new perspective.
The view from pruning-with-clippers.
And speaking of seeing the future.... This is how we ended a recent Sunday morning of pruning – celebrating 1-year with Tanager. Lunch on a blanket at the farm, followed by a stint at Winters’ City Park. (If you’re ever on I-505 or I-80 with kids who need a pit stop, this park’s playground is giant and amazing)
Our Oils
Right now, it’s looking like we won’t have a drop to spare beyond the club distribution. We’re getting ready to send out a unique citrus oil this year – Yuzu Bergamot. Last year we were eager to try a bergamot oil, making use of the organic bergamot tree on the farm. This year, with a larger crop than normal, we had a chance to try this, but ended up combining the bergamot with yuzu because we needed to do a larger run of olives than expected. The result is lovely. Slightly milder citrus than the past years’ yuzu oils, it has some some bright lemony, herby notes from the yuzu, then some earl gray complexity wafting across. We’re looking forward to hearing feedback and thinking on whether this will be an oil we try to do regularly.
Olive this, Olive that
Always looking to learn something new, this winter we partnered with one of our Yolo Press mentors, Dianne Madison, to put to use some of the 2017 harvest surplus oil. Dianne has been mastering the science and art of olive oil-based cosmetics and crafted a range of natural bar soap with delicate fragrances like lemon verbena, citrus-mint and cedar lavender. While Castile soap is historically 100% olive oil that has been saponified with lye or ash, modern recipes also use other oils like shea butter and avocado oil, to improve things like stability across different temperatures, foaminess, detail and release when used in molds. Our soaps aren't available for purchase (this year), but members may soon get a sneak peak.
In the kitchen
Lately, we have been getting back to basics in the kitchen. Avocado, cucumber, roasted potatoes. Dress heavily with fresh oil and a little salt.
This focaccia from club member Lilly in WA is an inspiration. From a new cooking show that has some great shots of hillside olive harvest in Italy, here is a recipe (and video) you could work from.
We also plan to try something like this, burrata with pickled onion, squash, grapefruit, roasted coriander seeds and bergamot oil, but probably simpler.
That’s all for now. Below are some more pictures from spring at the farm. Look for another update soon. And thank you for being part of the Flatlands community.
With appreciation,
Colin, Susan, Cypress & Tanager
Mystery in the grove. Why is the patch of grass on the right growing so much faster than the other areas around it? Clue: the whitened leaves above it.
More colors in the grove - from many points along the circle of life.