Growing your own basil plant at home gives you a tiny taster of the preoccupations of running a whole olive grove. Take watering: too little and the poor fella will wilt, too much and you could be held responsible for his drowning.
In the olive grove, the plus – and simultaneously the minus – is that you leave the watering responsibilities to Mother Nature. All very labour- saving but the trouble is she doesn’t always get it right. This year, while everyone else was enjoying the summer sun, we were fretting about the lack of rain. In fact we reckon we were only a couple of weeks away from losing the whole crop – if it gets too dry, the fruit can start to fall from the trees before it is ripe – and before we’ve put the nets down!
Thankfully, the skies opened in September and gave us all a life-saving soaking and a huge sense of relief. Phew. Now we are just getting ready to roll up our sleeves, and roll out the nets for this year’s harvest. Happy days.
Good luck with the olive oil harvest!
Has the harvest finished now? When does it happen? Thanks for a great blog read.