#extravergine

harvest time again. climbing trees, shaking olives, pulling tarps. feeling your back and and your arms and your legs. little scratches and bruises everywhere and being happy as shi… about it. the fall light in tuscany is golden, the sun is warm the nights are cold and starry, after summers heat the milky way is again visible. how i love our italian contadini life. let’s go frantoio.

the visit to the mill has brought us another round of real extra vergine, with an almost 20% oil from olives result. the guy from the frantoio kept telling me: "record! are you happy? you should be happy." and i was and still am. our dear neighbor luigi even topped it and came out with a 21% revenue. it's a little less spicy this year, because the olives were more mature. a late frost in spring and the hot, dry, long summer produced an early harvest and somewhat less olives. some trees didn't have fruit at all and since the harvest was so early all our planned helpers couldn't make it. but the result makes the work worthwhile and once you have had homemade olive oil it just ruins the supermarket experience, even if you buy the most expensive one you can find. my brother just sent me an article about the mediterranean olivecrisis and how climate change makes the already hard work an unpredictable enterprise. so we feel even more fortunate to having found a tuscan home that came with an olive grove. when we were looking for a house here, we didn't know much of what we were getting into, but fate took good care of us and so we got a bunch of things that we didn't know we needed. the olive grove is one of them, the vascone another, luigi the third and there are more. we weren't looking for 7 ha of land but now it's our little kingdom. we stop work on the house for taking care of the grove, because it's the season. doesn't really matter that it's also the season for starting the heating system in the house, but that can wait, the olives can't. so we are piling wood in our chimney and are happy in the one room that's comfy cozy in front of the fire and the head of a dog on your feet. i'm thinking of starting a crowdfunding site to buy more land around us and just let it be nature and wildlife, but i guess, it's doing well enough by itself. if you are still looking for a place to work your "behind" off, come in late march for the pruning of the olives ...