Moon over Martinborough

Flower buds on a Barnea (click to enlarge)

The other day I took a walk through the olive grove to see how the trees are doing.

It was comforting to see the small, green flower buds of spring. It isn’t always this way.

Sometimes olives groves don’t behave according to plan.

When we bought this place the house had been empty for some time, and the grove hadn’t been pruned or sprayed for pests and disease in years.

So it wasn’t producing very much.

Although we had the best intentions, our first year here it was all we could do to keep the grass down around the trees, and we never got around to pruning and spraying. Even so, we had a nice, small harvest with friends that first year, giving us 31 litres of oil from 90 or so trees.

It was during our second year that something went seriously wrong.

The problem

In October 2007, I heard the other olive growers talking about the abundance of flower buds in their groves, but when I went down to check our trees I found we had almost no flower buds at all.

I figured our flowers were late. That was all. But week after week it was the same story.

Each time I went down to the grove to check I felt a kind of sinking, terrible dread. Why were there no flower buds? It wasn’t supposed to be that way. No flowers meant no olives!

I wanted to be able to control the trees, to strangle their trunks until they screamed for mercy and started coughing up flower buds.

The noble Duke

A month later, I was walking through our grove with Simon Duchamp, another local olive grower. I’d asked Simon to come to our grove because I wanted him to tell me what the heck was wrong.

Simon is probably in his late 50s. He’s tall, tanned, and keeps in shape by doing most the work in his grove himself. I’m convinced that in another life he was some sort of broad-minded aristocrat – as comfortable in the opera house as he would be working in the fields with the peasants.

It was a hot day in early summer and the sky was bright. I reached out and pulled down a branch to show Simon.

“See?” I said. “Nothing. No buds. No flowers. Nothing.”

Simon frowned and looked down his nose at the disobliging branch. “Hmm.” Then he glanced up at the shelterbelt trees. “Where’s the prevailing wind?”

I pointed toward the pines up on a hill beyond our property. “Over there. South-westerly.”

Olive grove in November

He turned and walked on, carefully inspecting branches as he went. He hmm-ed and humph-ed and frowned again and again.

Finally he turned towards me and said, “I don’t know.”

“Huh?” I said.

“Clearly something’s not right,” Simon explained. “But I don’t know what.”

I felt a tightening in my chest. If the regal and industrious Mr. Simon Duchamp was stumped by what was going on in our olive grove, it had to be bad.

“Why don’t you come by and see my grove tomorrow?” he said. And I did.

The Duchamp grove

The next day I spent about half an hour with Simon. Strolling down the rows of his grove, I couldn’t believe how perfect everything looked.

His trees are a bit older than ours, and they are tall and healthy looking, just like him. But it was the flowers that amazed me. There were so many of them – tiny and open and creamy white. The entire grove seemed to be obscured by their softly glowing haze.

“See,” he said. “This is what your grove should look like. Perhaps you should get your soil tested.”

I felt woefully inadequate. There was no softly glowing haze around me.

“Thanks, Simon. I will.”

When I left that day, my brain began spinning into a hysterical frenzy of doubt and fear. I immediately started dreaming up names for all the new and horrible diseases that our grove surely must have. Terminal bud encephalopathy. Cataclysmic bio-toxic deflowerment.

I was convinced our trees were sick. They would probably never bear fruit again.

The investigation begins

As Rick always does whenever there’s even a hint of a crisis on the breeze, he swung into action. Within a week he had someone out from the local farm store, taking soil and leaf samples.

We also began talking to every olive grower we knew about how they do their pruning and what they spray with. That’s how we found out about Nevil the Nine-fingered Olive Pruner and Sam the Sprayer. We made appointments with them both.

A few weeks later, the results of the soil and leaf samples had already come back in the mail, and Rick and I stood in the kitchen looking at the large brown envelope. Rick opened it slowly.

Sunlight on the grass

Inside was complicated a report with graphs and charts that we didn’t understand. But then we saw the letter.

The trace elements were good, it explained. We could benefit from putting down some lime, but that was all. The bottom line was this: our grove was fine.

But I still wasn’t happy. I wanted to know why the trees hadn’t flowered. I wanted an answer. And I wasn’t going to rest until I had it.

The wisdom of the olive pruner

It was Nevil the Nine-Fingered Olive Pruner who finally gave me my answer, although it wasn’t what I wanted.

Nevil is a specialist in New Zealand olives. Based in the Hawkes Bay, he travels up and down the North Island pruning groves and dispensing with advice.

He knows more olive groves than most of us know people.

“Why didn’t our trees flower this year?” I asked bluntly. I was a man obsessed.

Nevil just nodded his head slowly. Then he asked me questions about our grove, about its history, about frosts and rain and this and that. I remembered an unusually late frost that had damaged the wisteria blossoms up at the house.

“It could have been that,” Nevil said. “A late frost when the buds are just forming on the olive trees could do a lot of damage.”

“So it was that?” I said.

“Maybe. Maybe not. It could be just because the grove hasn’t been sprayed or pruned in years.” He shrugged. “To be honest, you’ll never really know.”

“What do you mean?” He was an expert. He should know.

He must have seen the disappointment in my face. He leaned in. “Jared, sometimes you have a good year, sometimes your entire crop fails. Guess what. That’s agriculture.” He leaned back and opened his arms and laughed. “Welcome!”

The olive grove

Then he added something. “I’ll tell you one thing that’s certain. There’s nothing wrong with your grove. Your soil’s good. The trees are healthy. Whoever planted this grove put in a lot of work, and they did a great job. I wouldn’t mind having a grove like this myself.”

I thought of Priscilla, who planted those trees, and I said a quiet thank you to her in my head.

Nevil and I walked back up to the house. I had the only answer I was ever going to get.

Epilogue

We didn’t have a harvest that year, but it gave us the push we needed to start a regular spraying and pruning program. Nevil the Nine-fingered Olive Pruner and Sam the Sprayer continue to be a great help.

Already we’ve had a huge improvement. In our last harvest with friends, we got 48 litres of oil off the same 90 trees that 2 years ago gave us only 31. What’s even better, Helen the Olive Angel of Olivo came in and bought the fruit from the other parts of the grove. She organized that part of the harvest herself, and Rick and I even made a little money.

So its all turning out okay.

What is it you wish you could control, but can’t?

____________________

Related posts

Read other stories about:

• the olive grove
• the olive harvest
• gratitude
• barnea trees

Read the next post: Saturday morning fire.

Related websites

• Olivo

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