Taking care of your roots

As I have previously blogged, olive grove owners here in Italy have been incentivised to cut down olive trees so as to make picking easier for the ageing olive growers. Logic being, fewer trees less onerous the task.

I know what some of you might be thinking. Does this increase the amount of oil Italy imports from Spain and others and bottles up as made in Italy? I cannot possible say.

Some of my neighbours here in Manciano have taken this route.

One of the risks however is that when you rip the other trunks out with a small digger then you can weaken the tree irreversibly and so the trunk left dies as you can see below from a grove above Casa Margherita.