Winnie Relaxing

After a hard morning's work in the grove chasing lizards and barking it's time for our over-worked dog to relax and what better way than to haul yourself up into a chair arrange the cushions just so and ......

Festa Time!

Here in Italy many small villages and towns are either having their annual festa or preparing for it as June and July are very popular times to hold them.

A lot of them are themed around a food item as you can see from two of the posters below. No food item is above a festa. Polenta, celery, potatoes you name it, it will probably have a festa in it's honour.

Our local village, Trevi, has its festa in October when the famous black celery of Trevi is celebrated. More of that come October.

Otherwise as the "Piccione' poster shows, they are just an excuse for a good time.

Why they are going to this

This is a common sight in may olives groves here in central Umbria. The owner has taken the decision to reduce the tree to one single trunk.

The main driver of this decision is the shortage of labour come harvest time. In years gone by come harvest time a grove owner was able to call upon the extended family to help with the harvest. Nowadays lots of Italian children have left the family home and the family is more dispersed and so not available to call upon at harvest time.

So if you are like our neighbour, Mario, and have 5,000 trees and there are only two of you available to pick then the decision to go to one trunk is easy. Then you are able to use a machine to pick. This puts a net around the tree and then grabs the trunk and shakes it vigorously to shake the olives off.

The downside of this is that you have to wait until the fruit is less attached to the tree. This meant for some of our neighbours not picking until December whereas we at Casa Margherita started in late October. I think this is a great downside to this process and that our oil tastes better as it is in optimum condition when we pick as we continue to pick by hand.

Try our oil and see at www.casa-margherita.com/olive-oil/oliveoil.html

God Save Capello

That was the headline in today's La Gazetta Dello Sport but I am not sure that even God can save England after was what a truly shocking performance last night.

Why it's like this

This is one of our trees which is made up of four trunks from one root.

It is like this because in 1985 and again in 1995, Umbria suffered from a severe frost which killed off many thousands of olive trees from the ground upwards.

Olives are resistant to cold to a point but the weather was severe and many degrees below zero for days on end. Even olives cannot survive this.

The re-growth was allowed to grow to become anything from 2 to 3 to 4 trunks as we have here in our grove today.

A new olive

Here you can see the old olive flowers dying and turning brown and being replaced with the tiny green pods which will develop into big fat olives by the end of October/early November - or that's what I hope.

Poor old Gigi

With over 20 million Italians watching their teams opening match against Paraguay it is clear that they are pretty keen on their footy. The 20m represents about 30% of the population. Given this the news that their goalie Gigi Buffon has a back problem and may not take any further part is not good news. Gigi is a class keeper and Italy don't have any sort of back up as the general standard of Italian goalkeeping is poor so it will interesting to see how they perform against the mighty All Whites of New Zealand on Sunday.