Olive mountain

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Adam Pinson

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Don't want to make anyone jelous or anything, this is us filling our car with Olive firewood today and this is the mother load.... (some Almond too)
IMG_20210104_121655.jpg
 
Could i persuade you to bag up a load and post it? ( of olive)
I’m very happy to pay for a 30kg load
Due to Brexit, posting anything to the UK will now be expensive, maybe later in the year I'll fill the car and drive over....
 
Where does all the olive materealize from ! just seems interesting !
I wonder the same, Olive takes a long time to grow but there always seems to be mountains of it available, i guess tearing out diseased trees and planting new groves is a part of it, also many farmers here are reverting to planting vines and nut trees again.... could be something to do with the tree disease eminating from Italy and spreading here.....
 
Unfortunately, increasing 'sophistication' of young Italians (and young Spaniards, Greeks etc.) leads to decreasing interest in maintaining the family olive grooves. Mix that with urbanisation and illegal development, and you end up with destruction of native olive grooves and reliance on rubbish imported oil.

Slightly off topic, due to the way the regs are written, you can mix top-quality Italian (or Spanish or Greek) oil with cheaper oil from Turkey (and Africa etc.) and still call it 'Italian Olive Oil'. Italy for example produces about 6 times more oil oil than it has actual olives.

My in-laws in Italy have two Nocellara dell'Etna olive grooves which my late father-in-law planted as youngster (as in like, 12). We just got delivery of our portion of the oil before Christmas, which will do us for the year!
 
Unfortunately, increasing 'sophistication' of young Italians (and young Spaniards, Greeks etc.) leads to decreasing interest in maintaining the family olive grooves. Mix that with urbanisation and illegal development, and you end up with destruction of native olive grooves and reliance on rubbish imported oil.

Slightly off topic, due to the way the regs are written, you can mix top-quality Italian (or Spanish or Greek) oil with cheaper oil from Turkey (and Africa etc.) and still call it 'Italian Olive Oil'. Italy for example produces about 6 times more oil oil than it has actual olives.

My in-laws in Italy have two Nocellara dell'Etna olive grooves which my late father-in-law planted as youngster (as in like, 12). We just got delivery of our portion of the oil before Christmas, which will do us for the year!
Indeed yes, Italy buy tons of Olives from Spain and rebrands the oil as a way more expensive Italian oil.... many folk have no idea what pure unfiltered Olive oil tastes like either (less that 3 months old is best) as the supermarkets insist on filtering which creates a clear golden but tastless product.... we ourselves produce approx 150 ltrs of oil each season.
 
A lot of the olive wood comes from coppicing the trees. When they stop producing much fruit, they chop the top off the tree and let it regrow, producing new fruit.
 
Here in Crete, the Olive tree is regarded as royalty......
about this time chainsaws are running all day.....trimming......
fire wood for us it's just the prunings with the odd trunk......
But house and land sales are booming, that means more trees will be grubbed out.....
just a few get dug up and replanted......
I have one in my garden thats 1m in diameter at it's narrowest point.....
no idea on how many times the top has been hacked off....got to be 500 years old......
on a happy note there are new Olive groves being planted up....
 
Related story -

We use a lot of olive oil here. To the extent that I couldn't get the fire lit a while back so chucked some olive oil on it. For some reason this came out in conversation and the person I was talking to was shocked. I guess it's about £1 / 100ml or so at Tesco's?

One of my friends collects used oil for biofuel. One of his suppliers imports olives and the transit oil is looked on as a waste product.

My friend can't bring himself to throw it in with the other supply streams, and, as such, we have been on an "all you can eat" olive oil supply for about the last 5 years.

(I don't normally use it for fire lighting, it was just out of desperation and lack of time!)
 

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