Preparing olives for the table

This week: Preparing olives for the table; Planting seeds; Watching the weather;

Every week seems to be a busy week and this one has been no exception.

I had to go to Grad Hvar to meet the architect about my building permission and plans. The meeting was useful and I came home with several jobs to do next week.

I will have to go to the Cadaster, the government organisation where property and building details are kept, to get a certificate to show that my buildings were in existence before 1968.

Coming back home at lunch time, the warm autumn sun was shining on the blue Adriatic Sea. It really is this colour, all year.

This is the view looking south. The island on the horizon at the left is Otok Sušac, 50km away. If you set off in a boat and keep the island to your left, the next major land mass you come to is North Africa.

Builders have started work at the start of the lane where I live. They have been excavating the stone to make way for foundations for a house.

If you look at how much soil is on top of the bedrock, you can see why I have a problem with my soils drying out. There is just no depth or any real subsoil.

It also explains why my soil is fully ⅓ stone by volume.

I’ve pulled a few more weeds out this week, done some pruning and a few other jobs around my home.

Friday the 1st November is All Saint’s Day, a major public holiday here. On Thursday I went up to the graveyard at the big church on the promontory.

All Hallow’s Eve, the day preceeding All Saint’s Day is when people here tidy up the graves of relatives, place fresh flowers and smarten the place up ready for the following day.

The relatives of a neighbour who passed away a couple of years ago, who now live in Germany, asked me to make sure the everlasting candle batteries on her crypt are kept working. So I replaced them, to make sure the light would be bright. The graveyard looked beautiful with all the new flowers.

Friday really felt like a Saturday and now I feel as though I have lost a day this week too.

Preparing olives for the table

While I was in the Top Orchard I saw that one of my olive trees actually has enough olives to harvest,

It’s not laden by any means, however there are enough to make harvesting worthwhile.

The tree is a table olive variety called Kalamata. The process of turning olives on a tree into those sweet, stuffed olives that you buy in a supermarket is a long one.

Straight from the tree the fruits are bitter and inedible.

First I need to let my olives ripen, until they have a purple blush. Then they are cut and soaked in water for two to three weeks to remove the bitterness.

After that comes the pickling. Using wine vinegar, they are layered with citrus fruit and local herbs, then sealed. In three to six months they will be ready for eating….

Planting seeds

I found some Passion Fruit in the supermarket this week, something you do not see very often here.

After opening and using the pulp and seeds for a fruit salad, I kept some seeds back to see if I can germinate them.

The Passiflora edulis is the variety of Passion flower which is used for making juice and for the ripe snooker ball size fruit to be sold.

I have had success germinating seeds using “mini greenhouses”, the repurposed plastic supermarket boxes used for tomatoes and strawberries.

So I started by soaking the seeds for 24 hours in warm water.

I mixed some seed compost with water then half filled one of the mini greenhouses and left it out in the sun to warm.

After putting the seeds on the top of the soil, I lightly covered them with more soil and put the whole thing in my propagator.

During the day, I will continue the treatment of letting the mini greenhouse sit outside in the sun, but returning it at night to the currently unheated propagator overnight.

The related Purple Passionflower, Passiflora caerulea, grows wild here in Dol. 

It readily fruits, although the taste is rather insipid.

I’m hoping I can grow some fruiting varieties so not only can I enjoy the spectacular flowers, but also harvest a really useful fruit.

Watching the weather

Climate breakdown continues to affect the weather we experience, wherever we are in the world.

The exceptional rainfall event in Valencia this week, where twelve months of rain fell in 8 hours, is but one example of many from around the world, of weather events made more severe because of climate change.

So all my horticultural work has as its basis, the weather and climate. Climate is what you can expect and weather is what you get. Except at the moment the “Climate” is very much a moveable feast, and the weather we experience is enhanced by the changes to the climate.

Hot spells are hotter, rainfall events are more severe, hurricanes and cyclones are stronger, faster and the effects are more widespread.

We have had a very hot July and August, then September was significantly cooler than average, October has been warmer and here we are in November and it still warm and sunny. I have never had my solar water heater boiling in November before, but it was again today.

Throughout the summer my polytunnel has a lower wall of woven shade netting material. This allows air movement, lets rain in and humidity out and shades plants inside from the fierce sun.

Over the winter months, I cover the shade netting with a polythene sheet. I spent Friday getting the polytunnel ready for winter.

When I built the polytunnel I devised a system using wooden lats held in place by coach bolts and wing nuts, which make it easy to change the material underneath.

When I removed the lats, several were showing signs of wood rot underneath, so I left them out to dry in the sun, before brushing away the white powder with a wire brush.

I suspect they may only last another season before I need to replace them. But I used the cheapest possible wood to start with and at €2 a length, replacements will not be expensive.

After treating all the coach bolts with WD40, I unrolled the plastic and put the wooden lats back in place.

As the last of the day’s sun was disappearing behind the hills, I was fixing the last stainless steel wing nuts and washers in place.

Everything is now ready for winter again.

What I will be interested to see is the data from the thermometer inside the polytunnel, to see what difference the plastic cover makes, if any. NCG