"If the olive trees blossom in April, you'll have enough to collect them with barrels; if they bud in May, you'll have enough to fill a small measure; but if as late as June, you'll only be collecting handfuls." (Sicilian Proverb)

 Using the Sicilian proverb as our guiding principle, we should have barrels of olives this year -- barrels.  Our drought produced a decent enough growing year that we had a decent budding and a beautiful blossom, but then we received only our second storm of the year, and it was at the end of April, right when all the blossoms were on the tree.  We even got hail, right when we didn't need it, and then there was no more rain this year.

Sadly, the next day, we saw all of the olive blossoms laying on the ground under the trees and came to the sad realization that we would probably not have any olives this year.  So this was the way it was going to be.

Meanwhile, we attempted to manage a very ambitious construction schedule, tend to our table and wine grapes, get last year's olive oil bottled, labeled, make our spring and summer jams and jellies, get the grapes netted in July, and keep things moving forward.

If you read this blog, you may remember an epic war we waged with the coyotes in an effort to save our grapes.  We lost that battle, as well.  We discouragingly admitted that the only crop we will have successfully brought in this year is the Cabernet.

2014 has been a lesson in losing more of the battles than we've won, although we do plan to win the war.  Our construction is winding down, we're working out final glitches on that, and we decided that we ought to walk through the olive trees to determine if there are even enough to consider brining.

Much to our surprise, while all this construction and dust and noise and drought was going on, the
olives staged a comeback.  Not all of them, but the workhorse Frantoio has produced enough olives that it may carry the day and we may have the 750 pounds we need to take the olives to the mill -- maybe.  The trees on the eastern side of the driveway have no olives, but despite the losses to hail, coyotes -- whatever Mother Nature has thrown our way -- we may just pull it off.  Otherwise, we're going to have about 500 pounds of olives to brine and yours truly will be spending most of the fall and winter making brine.  

Check back with us to find out how this chapter of our story ends.




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