We are not producing olive oil at the moment and it will be several years until we do…
Between 2005 and 2015 we planted 8,000 olive trees, each tree starting off as a small sapling and dry farmed to encourage the growth of deep tap roots able to search out water sources from below rather than primarily irrigating the trees on the surface of the soil which leads to less resilient shallow roots. The rate of growth is very slow with dry farming and the olives are small but flavourful. 2015 was the first year there were enough olives , which we harvested by hand and then pressed to make a modest amount of oil.
As many of you may have already read or heard we had a devastating fire in 2017 on the farm which wiped out almost all of the olive trees in a matter of minutes. Since the fire very few olive trees have grown back, and the ones that have are taking a long time to recover.
