The Life and Times of an Olive Farmer (and his wife!)
They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but I prefer to think of Eddison’s line that “to invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk!”
So it was Eddison who was standing alongside me the other day whispering in my ear when, after three hours in the blazing sun and very high wind trying and failing to fix my main irrigation pipe , I said a few rather choice words of Anglo Saxon origin, moodily chucked my tools (ha!) in the back of Hank the Pick-up and went off in search of a pile of junk.
Now, if you’ve read other episodes of our saga, you’ll be aware that I’d previously blown up the same pipe and spent hours effecting a repair because I didn’t know what I was doing. Needing now to replace a section I’d taken the advice of experienced farmers and went equipped. The trick, they told me, is to use a blow torch to soften the 7.5 centimetre diameter plastic pipe, then using a “Mythos” beer bottle in a circular motion widen the mouth of the pipe sufficient to be able to put the 7.5 cm diameter steel joining piece into it, clamp it down with a huge circlip and “Robert est son oncle” as the French would say. (By the way, it has to be a Mythos bottle for some reason. Other non-Greek beers’ bottles just won’t do!)
So, well equipped (and refreshed as I’d drunk the Mythos first, aaaah!) I set to in a confident way. The high wind didn’t help, as the blowtorch kept blowing out and I had to rig up a wind shield, which kept blowing over and hitting me on the head as I crouched to my labour. However, the first bit of pipe duly softened, I got stuck in with the Mythos bottle. Carefully. After 5 minutes of shoving and twisting I’d almost got the thing in far enough for the job when the pipe, evidently insulted by such rough handling, just sort of disintegrated under the pressure. The resultant deformity had to be sawn off, and I started again. Three hours later, with a pile of sawn off pieces of pipe about my feet, I thought “there has to be something better than this!”
On the way home I stopped at the large co-operative farmers shop where you buy all of the stuff us farmers need. Girly it ain’t , although my olive farming wife loves to scour the shelves. I got hold of the guy who speaks English in there and explained to him what had been happening, expecting him to guffaw and point out some hidden mystery that would have saved me all the frustration and effort. Not a bit of it. He just said “Yes, that happens”. I explained that I’d done it not once but about 20 times. He smiled ruefully, lost in some memory of the same thing happening to him, or of his grandpa stomping home in a rage and reaching for the Raki bottle, and said “Yes, that happens”. Comforting in a way, but no flipping use at all.
Taking Eddison’s advice, I resolved to go off in search of a pile of junk and spent the next hour or two driving round the building sites in the town and peering into skips and dustbins, for I’d had an idea and needed just the right thing. Oddly, I found what I wanted quite quickly but discovered so many other riches (especially thrown away bits of steel reinforcing rods that I have a need for on the land and had been thinking of buying) that I carried on rooting about, musing on the vagaries of life that take an unhappy suit wearing company apparatchik and turn him into a very happy skip monkey in just 30 months.
The device I made, sitting on the terrace that evening sipping at a Raki or two was simplicity itself. Whittling with my knife and lovingly smoothing with some sandpaper I turned a 10 cm square piece of lumber into a 7.6cm round pipe bodger with a rounded bit at the end to ease the initial entry. Combined with the other element of the invention (some grease, a tin of which I’d weirdly carried all the way from the UK in the van when we escaped in case they didn’t have any here) I was sure it would work. The next day Anne joined me and I tell you no lie we’d done the job in about an hour! A quick warming with the blowtorch, stick the “patent pipe bodger” (registered design, patent applied for) in the pipe, bang with a mallet, cool with water, slip out the bodger and pop in the joint, tighten the clip, job done! I really ought to approach a manufacturer with it. We sang on the way home. To a Tamla Motown cd, which tells you something.
The olives are looking fine at the moment, despite only having one watering so far this year and that just recently. If you’ve never seen it, an olive tree that’s had no water will sort of pull in it’s leaves and the olives look dry and sort of wrinkly. Apply water and the next day the leaves will have resumed their normal appearance and the olives will have swelled and look all shiny, smooth and healthy. (It’s a pity we can’t undergo the same miracle). We wish the same were true of the other “baby” fruit trees and grape vines we have in our “orchard” plot that need much more care and attention. Despite our careful ministrations and the back breaking , shoulder wrenching graft of carrying water to the tender souls we have lost about ten vines and the Avocados have given up the ghost. Each time we go to the citrus trees they look on the brink of death but are still with us by the skin of their teeth, along with the pomegranates and the walnut. It has been a surprise that the most resistant trees are the peach and nectarines, closely followed by the cherries, bless ’em. You live and learn. We have about half an acre of land that’s just weeds at the moment waiting for me to find a month spare to clear them all and the “what shall we plant there?” question is increasingly leaning towards nectarines , for being as tough as old boots.
Whenever we’re on the groves we’re always keeping our eyes open for a new delight of nature and had a rare treat at the spring the other day whilst filling up our twenty 35 litre water containers ready to water the orchard. Without a care in the world and as nonchalant as you like a hedgehog wandered past us and lapped at the stream where it crosses the road. We were able to stand and examine him closely, take a photo and a little video, chat and coo at him and he just completely ignored us for about 20 minutes, during which he continuously lapped away (probably taking the first drink he’d had in an age and making the most of it). We used to have hedgehogs in our garden back in England but they disappeared , as a result we think of folks chucking down slug pellets (snail eats pellet, hedgehog eats snail, hedgehog dies). It was great to get reacquainted with one of these smashing little characters. In the end, thirst quenched, he wandered back into the groves, still ignoring us, cocky as you like, blithely indifferent to our presence.
One of the nicest things about having stumbled upon Sitia when looking for our new life is that the place is so nice and yet unspoilt by hordes of holidaymakers - and hordes of expats too ,with apologies to our readers (especially the aromatherapist and her hubby, you know who you are!). It’s so nice that people we care about from the UK can’t wait to visit. Our son and his fiancee are over at the moment and have brought with them four of their friends (all from Dublin, mind, where a pint of lager costs 6 euro and a packet of fags 7.80 euro!) Needless to say with the prices for beer and other essentials they’re pretty happy with the cost of an evening’s entertainment. With such a large group to entertain we’re looking forward to the bucolic pleasure of a picnic on the land. As some readers may recall, a while back I approached the local customs office about a large piece off a cable reel that has leant against their wall for at least two years. For those that don’t know, a cable reel is that super-size cotton reel that electric cables come on when they’re laying new mains wires in the streets. This was just one side, a heavy, 2 meter wide circle of timber, looking for all the world like some giant solid timber wheel off a 17th century farm cart, perfect for a skip robber’s picnic table. It looked so nice leaning against the customs house that I’d assumed they’d say no and explain that they wanted to plant flowers around it and use it as a feature, but interestingly they didn’t. Into the pick-up with it, make some legs for the table and two hours later we had an all weather, seat about 15, rustic farmer’s picnic table. We’ll be christening it properly this week with the Dublin contingent, some friends from the village and a mate or two from Sitia. And of course, our fun won’t get ruined by the bad weather, because we just don’t get bad weather (he said, smugly).
A word or two about the higher regions of the olive oil world following a slightly disconcerting chat this week with one of the higher ups at the Sitia farmer’s cooperative. It’s fairly widely known that the poor old Italians, who can’t make good olive oil for the life of them but certainly know how to make shoppers believe that they can, buy up the best oils of Crete from Sitia and from Kolimbari to mix with their own inferior mush, stick a fancy label on it and flog it to the housefraus of Europe with a slick advertising campaign depicting lots of peasants going happy about their work in the groves and getting stuck into the oil on their salads and bread with gusto. Mamma (still attractive for her age) is usually there smiling at the bambinos. Not a sign of bulk tankers and huge blending factories and fat cat millionaire suits on their yachts shouting down their satellite phones at their advertising executives in New York. Anyway, the bad news is that the Spanish, it is rumoured, have been buying up the Italians. The Spanish do have some good oil. The worry is that our traditional customers may suddenly stop buying the thousands of tonnes they currently source from here. When you look at the reliance in Sitia on the humble olive you very quickly realise that the local economy could have a disaster on its hands. Unfortunately, that local economy also means us!
Still , you have to be philosophic about it. As somebody once said ;
“Don’t take life too seriously, or you’ll never get out of it alive!”
Showing posts with label organic olive oil freedom escape crete. Show all posts
Showing posts with label organic olive oil freedom escape crete. Show all posts
Saturday, 23 May 2009
What is this world, if full of care.....
“What is this life if, full of care
We have no time to stand and stare”
Or something very much like that. I guess the poet , William Henry Davies , knew what he was talking about and I’ve certainly come to appreciate this most sedentary of occupations of late. I’ve been toddling off to the groves to see to things, mostly the trimming out of dead wood from the trees, a little watering of the new “Nebbiola” grape vines we’ve planted, whilst Anne has stayed at home to murder the “Cretan Lurgy” with bleach. (The Cretan Lurgy is our name for the black mould that grows on one’s ceiling over the winter here if you’re “lucky” enough to have a property built by an engineer who thinks that a concrete roof is a good idea and has never read up on the benefits of insulation. For those of you that have the lurgy and don‘t know the remedy, can I suggest a paintbrush and neat bleach. Wear suitable protective clothing and keep the windows open.)
Having the freedom allowed by being out of sight of the boss has granted me a certain lassitude, and so “standing and staring” has become something of a hobby just lately. Still, I pretend to be worn out when I get home, which say’s something I guess about the casual dissemblance one gets into after nearly 30 years of marriage! Not that I’m fooling anybody.
The groves are quiet at the moment. The picking season is well and truly over, the fertiliser is spread, the major pruning is done and the weed control ( if you use herbicides-which we don’t) is over, At other times we can hear the conversations of other farmers across the valley and their machinery at work, but now we are entering the summer the company we’ll keep is with nature. Hence, I guess, the propensity to stand and stare. It starts with the bees. We’ve a bee man close to us who, at certain times of the year ,relocates his hives to a plot close to our groves. He moves the hives about so that his bees are always where there are wild plants in flower. When the bees arrive at their new stamping ground the first thing they do is go on an extended “recce” of the surrounds. You can tell that’s the mode they’re in because they come out in great swarms, hugging the ground and identifying the flowers, but they don’t stop to feed. The data about the best places then gets taken back to the hive and communicated in that weird an unfathomable dance they do at the hive’s entrance. After a couple of days they’ve got it all sorted out and the pollen gathering begins in earnest. (Is this the best honey in the world? Probably.)
The effect on me is interesting. I’m there, pruning away, lost in a very pleasant world of my own, when suddenly my subconscious pipes up. “Hey”, it says, “what’s all that buzzing?” It usually happens around three in the afternoon, which tells me that the bees keep to some sort of schedule. The noise is really something. It’s truly amazing how thousands of bees arriving on their hunting expedition all at once can command the attention. I’ve never been frightened of buzzy things, ever since when a child back in England a six year old girl who lived in our cul-de-sac showed me how she could catch a bumble bee in her hand and it wouldn’t sting her, and I’m a big fan of honey so thousands of bees going about their business is nothing but good news. Except, as I find a branch to sit on and enjoy just listening to this lovely cacophony of industry, nothing is getting done.
Then there’s the view. Back home we lived in a very pleasant avenue of 1920’s houses, but all we could see out of the windows was a very pleasant avenue of 1920’s houses (and our neighbours washing their cars). One of the reasons we bought our olives was the view. We can see for miles in most directions. Firstly there’s the macro view, across the valley to the village of Agios Georgios. It’s an area renowned for the health giving properties of it’s natural springs and the water thereof gives life to deciduous trees, which give us autumn colour that is reminiscent of Blighty, and to cypress which spire upwards in a very Tuscan way from the deep clefts in the mountainsides where there is more water in the summer. Then there are the distant views. To the south the mountains grow in height towards the south coast of the island, layering one on another as they go, growing greyer and more misty, the odd church in pristine white picking itself out here and there, built on the mountain tops so as to be closer to God. To the north, the valley weaves down to the sea at Sitia, spur after spur of olive grove covered hillsides interlinking until they meet the blue of the sea. You just can’t help but stand and stare. And stare. Then take time out to stare a bit more. There’s always something to catch the eye and keep you from the job in hand.
For selfish reasons I guess I shouldn’t wax lyrical about Sitia and it’s environs. We few Brits who live here like to think it’s our little secret. It’s a farming community with it’s economy , and I guess it’s soul ,rooted deep in the red earth and the traditions, music, drinking habits, family values and hospitality of old Crete. The last of the Minoans ended up here, the mountains in between Sitia and Agios Nikolaus acting as a barrier between them and the rest of the world then as they do know, so I guess the genetic and possibly even the socio-cultural embers of that particular fire of civilisation still exist here. Like all small places, it has it’s share of small mindedness and gossip, but it’s a place that majors in generosity, especially -as is so often the case- from those who haven’t much to be generous with. It’s also a place that is not too far removed from the days when most of it’s inhabitants were self sufficient, living off the land and it’s bounty. Most people grew their own food and olives, made their own wine and raki, kept a few hens and a goat, collected snails and gathered mountain greens. Many still do. It’s a way of life that has gone out of fashion but is almost certainly the way of life that created the legendary longevity of the Cretans.
A few days back Anne and I arrived at one of our groves only to find some people wandering about with little knives in their hands and bags of green stuff which they’d obviously been picking. Now an English farmer would be reaching for his shotgun and shouting “git orf moi laarnd” but here in Crete there isn’t much in the way of trespass law, quite rightly, and anyway we had no idea what they were picking so if they hadn’t it would have gone to waste. As it turns out one of the group was Malarmo, a delightful lady who once lived in Australia and consequently speaks English. They were picking wild asparagus. When she showed me the vegetable in question, and told me how my groves were full of the stuff, I privately wondered how come I had never seen any before. Of course, the reason is I’m too slow. The same is true of the little yellow narcissus with the beautiful scent. We once met an old lady on the groves with three carrier bags full of them that she‘d gathered “up there“ (I.e. on “ower laarnd“). We‘ve never seen one of those either, being in all probability too late! We guess she was about 90 and probably knows within a day or so when anything good to eat or otherwise worth having appears in the countryside and where it is to be found. And good luck to her. We often ponder the enormous wealth of knowledge of their surroundings that these elder Cretans have and wonder what will become of it as the younger generations head for a different and newer life in the cities. I guess we might one day find that no-one has picked the wild asparagus, and I guess that might be a sad day, marking the passing of an age and a way of life.
As I write the olives are becoming heavy with their millions of tiny white flowers, the branches starting to bend a little with the extra weight. Olives carry an abundance of flowers, but only about 5% of them eventually become fruit. They are wind pollinated rather than insect pollinated, so one rarely sees the bees taking an interest. The olive tends to bear fruit in alternative years and this year, barring climactic or other disaster, should bring a heavy crop. Certainly those of our trees which had little or no fruit last year are covered in flower now. In an abundant year the olives weigh so heavily on the branches that the tree assumes the habit of a weeping willow, elegantly sagging under the weight. Our best tree last year yielded 100kg of olives, so you can understand the forces at work.
Some of those olives we hand picked to preserve for eating. To do this, soak the olives in fresh water for about ten days, changing the water daily. Then soak them in brine, using about 100grams of salt for each litre or so. After a few weeks, (having kept an eye on them and changed the brine when murky or if mould threatens), have some fun with flavourings. We’ve put our olives in jars of oil, adding bay leaves, peppercorns, coriander seeds, rosemary, chilli flakes, salt and dried thyme. We reckon they’re the best in the world, but of course we are a little biased!
We have no time to stand and stare”
Or something very much like that. I guess the poet , William Henry Davies , knew what he was talking about and I’ve certainly come to appreciate this most sedentary of occupations of late. I’ve been toddling off to the groves to see to things, mostly the trimming out of dead wood from the trees, a little watering of the new “Nebbiola” grape vines we’ve planted, whilst Anne has stayed at home to murder the “Cretan Lurgy” with bleach. (The Cretan Lurgy is our name for the black mould that grows on one’s ceiling over the winter here if you’re “lucky” enough to have a property built by an engineer who thinks that a concrete roof is a good idea and has never read up on the benefits of insulation. For those of you that have the lurgy and don‘t know the remedy, can I suggest a paintbrush and neat bleach. Wear suitable protective clothing and keep the windows open.)
Having the freedom allowed by being out of sight of the boss has granted me a certain lassitude, and so “standing and staring” has become something of a hobby just lately. Still, I pretend to be worn out when I get home, which say’s something I guess about the casual dissemblance one gets into after nearly 30 years of marriage! Not that I’m fooling anybody.
The groves are quiet at the moment. The picking season is well and truly over, the fertiliser is spread, the major pruning is done and the weed control ( if you use herbicides-which we don’t) is over, At other times we can hear the conversations of other farmers across the valley and their machinery at work, but now we are entering the summer the company we’ll keep is with nature. Hence, I guess, the propensity to stand and stare. It starts with the bees. We’ve a bee man close to us who, at certain times of the year ,relocates his hives to a plot close to our groves. He moves the hives about so that his bees are always where there are wild plants in flower. When the bees arrive at their new stamping ground the first thing they do is go on an extended “recce” of the surrounds. You can tell that’s the mode they’re in because they come out in great swarms, hugging the ground and identifying the flowers, but they don’t stop to feed. The data about the best places then gets taken back to the hive and communicated in that weird an unfathomable dance they do at the hive’s entrance. After a couple of days they’ve got it all sorted out and the pollen gathering begins in earnest. (Is this the best honey in the world? Probably.)
The effect on me is interesting. I’m there, pruning away, lost in a very pleasant world of my own, when suddenly my subconscious pipes up. “Hey”, it says, “what’s all that buzzing?” It usually happens around three in the afternoon, which tells me that the bees keep to some sort of schedule. The noise is really something. It’s truly amazing how thousands of bees arriving on their hunting expedition all at once can command the attention. I’ve never been frightened of buzzy things, ever since when a child back in England a six year old girl who lived in our cul-de-sac showed me how she could catch a bumble bee in her hand and it wouldn’t sting her, and I’m a big fan of honey so thousands of bees going about their business is nothing but good news. Except, as I find a branch to sit on and enjoy just listening to this lovely cacophony of industry, nothing is getting done.
Then there’s the view. Back home we lived in a very pleasant avenue of 1920’s houses, but all we could see out of the windows was a very pleasant avenue of 1920’s houses (and our neighbours washing their cars). One of the reasons we bought our olives was the view. We can see for miles in most directions. Firstly there’s the macro view, across the valley to the village of Agios Georgios. It’s an area renowned for the health giving properties of it’s natural springs and the water thereof gives life to deciduous trees, which give us autumn colour that is reminiscent of Blighty, and to cypress which spire upwards in a very Tuscan way from the deep clefts in the mountainsides where there is more water in the summer. Then there are the distant views. To the south the mountains grow in height towards the south coast of the island, layering one on another as they go, growing greyer and more misty, the odd church in pristine white picking itself out here and there, built on the mountain tops so as to be closer to God. To the north, the valley weaves down to the sea at Sitia, spur after spur of olive grove covered hillsides interlinking until they meet the blue of the sea. You just can’t help but stand and stare. And stare. Then take time out to stare a bit more. There’s always something to catch the eye and keep you from the job in hand.
For selfish reasons I guess I shouldn’t wax lyrical about Sitia and it’s environs. We few Brits who live here like to think it’s our little secret. It’s a farming community with it’s economy , and I guess it’s soul ,rooted deep in the red earth and the traditions, music, drinking habits, family values and hospitality of old Crete. The last of the Minoans ended up here, the mountains in between Sitia and Agios Nikolaus acting as a barrier between them and the rest of the world then as they do know, so I guess the genetic and possibly even the socio-cultural embers of that particular fire of civilisation still exist here. Like all small places, it has it’s share of small mindedness and gossip, but it’s a place that majors in generosity, especially -as is so often the case- from those who haven’t much to be generous with. It’s also a place that is not too far removed from the days when most of it’s inhabitants were self sufficient, living off the land and it’s bounty. Most people grew their own food and olives, made their own wine and raki, kept a few hens and a goat, collected snails and gathered mountain greens. Many still do. It’s a way of life that has gone out of fashion but is almost certainly the way of life that created the legendary longevity of the Cretans.
A few days back Anne and I arrived at one of our groves only to find some people wandering about with little knives in their hands and bags of green stuff which they’d obviously been picking. Now an English farmer would be reaching for his shotgun and shouting “git orf moi laarnd” but here in Crete there isn’t much in the way of trespass law, quite rightly, and anyway we had no idea what they were picking so if they hadn’t it would have gone to waste. As it turns out one of the group was Malarmo, a delightful lady who once lived in Australia and consequently speaks English. They were picking wild asparagus. When she showed me the vegetable in question, and told me how my groves were full of the stuff, I privately wondered how come I had never seen any before. Of course, the reason is I’m too slow. The same is true of the little yellow narcissus with the beautiful scent. We once met an old lady on the groves with three carrier bags full of them that she‘d gathered “up there“ (I.e. on “ower laarnd“). We‘ve never seen one of those either, being in all probability too late! We guess she was about 90 and probably knows within a day or so when anything good to eat or otherwise worth having appears in the countryside and where it is to be found. And good luck to her. We often ponder the enormous wealth of knowledge of their surroundings that these elder Cretans have and wonder what will become of it as the younger generations head for a different and newer life in the cities. I guess we might one day find that no-one has picked the wild asparagus, and I guess that might be a sad day, marking the passing of an age and a way of life.
As I write the olives are becoming heavy with their millions of tiny white flowers, the branches starting to bend a little with the extra weight. Olives carry an abundance of flowers, but only about 5% of them eventually become fruit. They are wind pollinated rather than insect pollinated, so one rarely sees the bees taking an interest. The olive tends to bear fruit in alternative years and this year, barring climactic or other disaster, should bring a heavy crop. Certainly those of our trees which had little or no fruit last year are covered in flower now. In an abundant year the olives weigh so heavily on the branches that the tree assumes the habit of a weeping willow, elegantly sagging under the weight. Our best tree last year yielded 100kg of olives, so you can understand the forces at work.
Some of those olives we hand picked to preserve for eating. To do this, soak the olives in fresh water for about ten days, changing the water daily. Then soak them in brine, using about 100grams of salt for each litre or so. After a few weeks, (having kept an eye on them and changed the brine when murky or if mould threatens), have some fun with flavourings. We’ve put our olives in jars of oil, adding bay leaves, peppercorns, coriander seeds, rosemary, chilli flakes, salt and dried thyme. We reckon they’re the best in the world, but of course we are a little biased!
Easter time in Crete.
If you have been following our story so far you’ll know that our first harvest dragged on far longer than we had expected. As soon as it had been picked and pressed we decided to take “a day or two” off as a well deserved rest and review what work we still have to do before summer. Certain natural cut-offs dictate the farmers’ calendar here in Crete. For example , it’s important to get the fertiliser down well before it stops raining*, otherwise it won‘t get washed in. Additionally, you should do any pruning and major weed removal projects by the same time so that the resulting heaps of wood and weeds can be safely burned off. Fires are banned here after the last day of April , and when you recall the disaster in mainland Greece last year it’s easy to understand this precaution.
(*Explanatory note for our readers on holiday from England: “Before it stops raining” means that the water that comes from the sky stops doing so for about six months or so! You can arrange to have a barbecue, no worries!)
I say “a day or two“, but in reality very little work has been done since the harvest finished on February the 4th, mostly on account of “Ooh, my back” and “Blimey, my hands“. The back, after 20 years of having to do nothing very much other than hold my head and shoulders up, naturally objected to being suddenly treated like some sort of Navvy and required to do some manual work for a change. It went on a very painful strike. The hands, similarly insulted, came out in sympathy. Each night they seize up into claws which have to be unbent , painfully , each morning. I guess it’s the muscles going into some sort of spasm. When you see an old Cretan olive farmer hobbling to his beat-up old pick-up, now you know why he’s hobbling, (and remember to say hello, it could be me!)
Anne , who is obviously made of sterner stuff than I, has been sympathetic and handy with the back soothing creams (I can recommend something called Counterpain even though it sounds like something you used to throw over the bed). Being a fairly senior nurse by previous profession she‘s pretty good at telling the patient to behave, sit up straight, get back into bed etc in that particular “you‘ll do as you‘re told“ kind of voice that they must teach them at nursing school. So with Matron in charge and my natural inclination to be a complete wuss when in the slightest pain we’ve managed little of what we should have.
All plants like a bit of fertiliser and Olive trees are no exception. Fertilising is a word that’s always conjured certain images, and now we get to fertilise 750 times a year! The technique is simple: First load up your pick-up with as many 25 kg sacks of nitrogen-with-boron and 30 kg sacks of phosphor as you’ll need for the day. Go “ouch” for a bit. Drive to the groves, unload the bags at a fairly inconvenient place and then carry them 50 meters to where you’re going to start. Go “aarrghh”! Once there, wait for the pain to stop, then tip the nitrogen into the wheelbarrow and put the phosphor, in its bag, on top. Slit the top of the phosphor bag, and you’re ready to go. Stop for a breather and a bit of a rub, and whimper quite a lot like a big kid.
Some of the more observant readers will have spotted that the bags are carried to the wheelbarrow, and not put in the barrow at the van and wheeled to where needed. Well, I can only say that you have to try each method personally before deciding which suits you best. Over rough ground ,uphill ,with a heavy barrow believe me, carrying the stuff is easier, (at least until you’re at the dispensing stage, trundling 5 meters at a time from tree to tree.)
To dispense the fertiliser, take 2.5 kilos of nitrogen-with-boron (in an old saucepan that you just happened to know would be ideal for the job when you were packing your few belongings together and leaving Blighty) and 1 kilo of phosphor, (I recommend an old Greek yoghurt pot for the purpose), bend down and walk in a circle under the branches of the tree ,sprinkling as you go. If the tree’s on a slope, sprinkle a bit more at the top than at the bottom. Be careful the tree doesn’t get romantic during this fertilising and give you a kiss. A kiss from an olive tree consists of it deliberately stretching out a sturdy branch and clouting you firmly on the head with it. Anne seems to get away with very few kisses, but in my blundering I usually pick up one or two a day. Follicly challenged as I am this means of course that my head is always covered in scratches, scabs and bumps. A kind of arboreal love-bite. I wonder ,therefore, if our trees are female rather than male? And how do you find out the sex of a tree anyway? Before we started this craziness I didn’t even know that trees could be either male or female. What’s that all about?
A side-note about organic fertiliser. It’s made from Guano (dried bird poo , to be as polite as I know our readers will expect ), dried blood, and the leftovers from fish processing factories. You’re right, it absolutely stinks. Stinks of what it’s made from. Each night we’d drive home with Hank’s windows fully open, (Hank is our pick-up), pray we didn’t meet anyone between parking Hank and getting upstairs to our apartment, strip down to our undies on the landing (not sexy, not with that smell) and leave the clothes outside the front door to ward off evil spirits. We’d fight over who gets in the shower first. Scrub exposed skin parts several times vigorously to get rid of the stink. Wash our hair four times (in my case, not a big job!) and still sometimes a lingering whiff can be had! It must be good for the trees, as my Dad always reckoned fertiliser has to pong to be any good.
Because of the length of time it took to get the harvest in and then the dodgy back and hands we were late with the fertilising. In fact, as I write we’re getting the first rain we’ve had since putting the fertiliser down. If it doesn’t rain, it doesn’t get soaked in and 6 days’ work and 600 Euro will blow away in the summer wind. We reckon we need another 8 days rain to do the job properly, and there’s little chance of that. To help, our mates are washing their cars and cleaning their windows , which is powerful rain generating voodoo. I’m trying to persuade Anne to strip naked and do a rain dance, but regrettably so far without success. I don’t know if rain dancing requires nudity, but it certainly sounds like it might and it would be considerably more entertaining that way.
Back permitting, we’ve been doing a bit of pruning on the large, old, uncared for trees that form the majority of our stock. Really, they need the big “rejuvenation” prune, cutting them right back and flattening their profile to a workable height. However, this year’s harvest should be a heavy one relative to last year’s ,so we’re reluctant to give it up by doing the big cut. The problem with most of the trees is that they haven’t been trimmed at all in about ten years. The outer profile is rounded and inside the tree looks like someone has gone mad with a dead- twig-making-machine just for fun. The riotous proliferation of these useless twigs slowed us down considerably at harvest time, having to fight through them to get at the olives. They have to go.
Between half an hour and two hours with the trusty pruning saw and the “Felco Professional Number 7” secateurs (the best, especially for those with dodgy hands) and all the dead, dying, and useless twiggy festoonery is gone. The tree is transformed internally, lots more light can get through (which is important) and the branches which will carry this year’s harvest are now easy to get at. The yield should improve, as the tree would otherwise expend energy maintaining this useless wood, and the next harvest should be a relatively easy affair. So, 12 trees done so far, 230 trees to prune, other jobs to do , the end of April as a deadline. You’re right, we’ve got no chance!
In the next day or so we’re expecting delivery of our grape vines. A few years ago I was fortunate enough to work for an organisation where money was no object when it came to entertainment and it was at that time that I discovered “Barolo” wine, normally far outside my £4.99 a bottle maximum budget. (In this case, £60 outside! My current hooch of choice is local Raki at 6 euro for a litre and a half. How times change…) “Barolo” is arguably the best red wine in the world and the grape variety from which it is made, “Nebbiola”, grows successfully in few places. Italy is one, Kephalonia is another, so we’re hoping Sitia, Crete is another.
Just after we’d bought our land we found a little flat area tucked away in a sheltered corner covered with chest high weeds and a few chest high olive trees. Five days of hard weed-clearing graft, slashing dragging and burning, revealed a lovely little terrace where we discovered SOIL! A rare commodity indeed. As the Minoans at Praissos just 0.5 km away numbered 20,000 some 4000 years BC it’s fairly obvious that they farmed the area where our groves are. There’s something in the atmosphere about this little plot that makes us feel they made this little terrace and grew vegetables or something here some 6000 years ago. We now call it “The Orchard Plot” and have augmented the few small olives with half a dozen different varieties of orange trees, a grapefruit, a lemon, two pomegranates, a peach which as I write has burst into flower, a mandarin, a Japanese Loquat, two avocadoes and a walnut. We’ve already got two pears and almond trees. On order are a couple of cherries and a brace of nectarines, so hopefully, in about 5 years, we won’t have to buy any fruit or nuts ever again. The pears, by the way, are this year going to be made into Raki, or “Calvados” as they call pear brandy in Normandy!
The Nebbiola vines will fill up the orchard plot and who knows, in two or three years time we might have our first Barolo wine. Having ordered the grapes and readied the land only then did we do a bit of research on the internet where we read that Barolo is often undrinkable early on, only becoming the king of wines after 20 years in an oak cask! Ah well, it’s good to have long term goals to live for.
This time of year is decidedly the most beautiful in the groves. The olives, peaches and almonds are in blossom, with the wild pears and soon the cultivated pears to come. Everywhere is amazingly green with a luminescence rarely seen anywhere else. As our land has never seen weed killer the profusion of wildflowers is astonishing and every day sees a new variety of flower emerge. There is a clover-type plant that is everywhere and produces thousands of yellow flowers. Anenomes abound in various forms. There are a profusion of orchids, particularly “bee” orchids, tiny flowers that look just like bumble bees. We are reminded of the old water-meadows in England before the advent of corporate prairie farming and the mass chemicalisation of once rich and verdant land.
One of our neighbouring farmers (downhill from us, thankfully) is still sold on the idea that herbicides are a great idea. His groves are now barren earth, with not a flower or a blade of grass in sight. Strangely, as you walk through them there is a marked absence of birdsong too. We imagine that the lack of vegetation means that there is no habitat for the insect life on which the birds feed, and so the birds go elsewhere. “Our” badgers, that have a large and well established set in one of our groves, probably ignore the place too , as there would be nothing there for them to eat . On our groves, conversely, we often see a circle of trodden-down vegetation around the trees, left there by the badgers as they search for their evening meal. We know that farmers got sold on the idea of an easy life with the products of the chemical giants, and more certainty of crop yields with the use of herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilisers, but the environmental cost is frightening. Unsuspecting consumers buy the oil produced by olive trees farmed by tens of thousands of these “chemical” olive farmers across Europe and elsewhere never fully comprehending the chemical cocktails they might contain. As with other supposedly “good for you“ fruits and vegetables produced with intensive use of fungicides, pesticides and herbicides and with chemical fertilisers there must, one would imagine, be a negative health impact over time? Olive oil consumers tend to imagine that they are keeping themselves healthy and in reality, unless the oil is organic, are consuming who knows what residual chemicals?
To spot olive trees that are spared the chemicals, look for string tied from branch to branch around the perimeter of the grove, or a red striped plastic band. The olives from these trees are often the ones used to produce oil for family consumption. Make a friend of the farmer and if they are anything like the farmers around Sitia they’ll probably give you some of this most precious commodity.
“” as we say here in Crete. Happy Easter
(*Explanatory note for our readers on holiday from England: “Before it stops raining” means that the water that comes from the sky stops doing so for about six months or so! You can arrange to have a barbecue, no worries!)
I say “a day or two“, but in reality very little work has been done since the harvest finished on February the 4th, mostly on account of “Ooh, my back” and “Blimey, my hands“. The back, after 20 years of having to do nothing very much other than hold my head and shoulders up, naturally objected to being suddenly treated like some sort of Navvy and required to do some manual work for a change. It went on a very painful strike. The hands, similarly insulted, came out in sympathy. Each night they seize up into claws which have to be unbent , painfully , each morning. I guess it’s the muscles going into some sort of spasm. When you see an old Cretan olive farmer hobbling to his beat-up old pick-up, now you know why he’s hobbling, (and remember to say hello, it could be me!)
Anne , who is obviously made of sterner stuff than I, has been sympathetic and handy with the back soothing creams (I can recommend something called Counterpain even though it sounds like something you used to throw over the bed). Being a fairly senior nurse by previous profession she‘s pretty good at telling the patient to behave, sit up straight, get back into bed etc in that particular “you‘ll do as you‘re told“ kind of voice that they must teach them at nursing school. So with Matron in charge and my natural inclination to be a complete wuss when in the slightest pain we’ve managed little of what we should have.
All plants like a bit of fertiliser and Olive trees are no exception. Fertilising is a word that’s always conjured certain images, and now we get to fertilise 750 times a year! The technique is simple: First load up your pick-up with as many 25 kg sacks of nitrogen-with-boron and 30 kg sacks of phosphor as you’ll need for the day. Go “ouch” for a bit. Drive to the groves, unload the bags at a fairly inconvenient place and then carry them 50 meters to where you’re going to start. Go “aarrghh”! Once there, wait for the pain to stop, then tip the nitrogen into the wheelbarrow and put the phosphor, in its bag, on top. Slit the top of the phosphor bag, and you’re ready to go. Stop for a breather and a bit of a rub, and whimper quite a lot like a big kid.
Some of the more observant readers will have spotted that the bags are carried to the wheelbarrow, and not put in the barrow at the van and wheeled to where needed. Well, I can only say that you have to try each method personally before deciding which suits you best. Over rough ground ,uphill ,with a heavy barrow believe me, carrying the stuff is easier, (at least until you’re at the dispensing stage, trundling 5 meters at a time from tree to tree.)
To dispense the fertiliser, take 2.5 kilos of nitrogen-with-boron (in an old saucepan that you just happened to know would be ideal for the job when you were packing your few belongings together and leaving Blighty) and 1 kilo of phosphor, (I recommend an old Greek yoghurt pot for the purpose), bend down and walk in a circle under the branches of the tree ,sprinkling as you go. If the tree’s on a slope, sprinkle a bit more at the top than at the bottom. Be careful the tree doesn’t get romantic during this fertilising and give you a kiss. A kiss from an olive tree consists of it deliberately stretching out a sturdy branch and clouting you firmly on the head with it. Anne seems to get away with very few kisses, but in my blundering I usually pick up one or two a day. Follicly challenged as I am this means of course that my head is always covered in scratches, scabs and bumps. A kind of arboreal love-bite. I wonder ,therefore, if our trees are female rather than male? And how do you find out the sex of a tree anyway? Before we started this craziness I didn’t even know that trees could be either male or female. What’s that all about?
A side-note about organic fertiliser. It’s made from Guano (dried bird poo , to be as polite as I know our readers will expect ), dried blood, and the leftovers from fish processing factories. You’re right, it absolutely stinks. Stinks of what it’s made from. Each night we’d drive home with Hank’s windows fully open, (Hank is our pick-up), pray we didn’t meet anyone between parking Hank and getting upstairs to our apartment, strip down to our undies on the landing (not sexy, not with that smell) and leave the clothes outside the front door to ward off evil spirits. We’d fight over who gets in the shower first. Scrub exposed skin parts several times vigorously to get rid of the stink. Wash our hair four times (in my case, not a big job!) and still sometimes a lingering whiff can be had! It must be good for the trees, as my Dad always reckoned fertiliser has to pong to be any good.
Because of the length of time it took to get the harvest in and then the dodgy back and hands we were late with the fertilising. In fact, as I write we’re getting the first rain we’ve had since putting the fertiliser down. If it doesn’t rain, it doesn’t get soaked in and 6 days’ work and 600 Euro will blow away in the summer wind. We reckon we need another 8 days rain to do the job properly, and there’s little chance of that. To help, our mates are washing their cars and cleaning their windows , which is powerful rain generating voodoo. I’m trying to persuade Anne to strip naked and do a rain dance, but regrettably so far without success. I don’t know if rain dancing requires nudity, but it certainly sounds like it might and it would be considerably more entertaining that way.
Back permitting, we’ve been doing a bit of pruning on the large, old, uncared for trees that form the majority of our stock. Really, they need the big “rejuvenation” prune, cutting them right back and flattening their profile to a workable height. However, this year’s harvest should be a heavy one relative to last year’s ,so we’re reluctant to give it up by doing the big cut. The problem with most of the trees is that they haven’t been trimmed at all in about ten years. The outer profile is rounded and inside the tree looks like someone has gone mad with a dead- twig-making-machine just for fun. The riotous proliferation of these useless twigs slowed us down considerably at harvest time, having to fight through them to get at the olives. They have to go.
Between half an hour and two hours with the trusty pruning saw and the “Felco Professional Number 7” secateurs (the best, especially for those with dodgy hands) and all the dead, dying, and useless twiggy festoonery is gone. The tree is transformed internally, lots more light can get through (which is important) and the branches which will carry this year’s harvest are now easy to get at. The yield should improve, as the tree would otherwise expend energy maintaining this useless wood, and the next harvest should be a relatively easy affair. So, 12 trees done so far, 230 trees to prune, other jobs to do , the end of April as a deadline. You’re right, we’ve got no chance!
In the next day or so we’re expecting delivery of our grape vines. A few years ago I was fortunate enough to work for an organisation where money was no object when it came to entertainment and it was at that time that I discovered “Barolo” wine, normally far outside my £4.99 a bottle maximum budget. (In this case, £60 outside! My current hooch of choice is local Raki at 6 euro for a litre and a half. How times change…) “Barolo” is arguably the best red wine in the world and the grape variety from which it is made, “Nebbiola”, grows successfully in few places. Italy is one, Kephalonia is another, so we’re hoping Sitia, Crete is another.
Just after we’d bought our land we found a little flat area tucked away in a sheltered corner covered with chest high weeds and a few chest high olive trees. Five days of hard weed-clearing graft, slashing dragging and burning, revealed a lovely little terrace where we discovered SOIL! A rare commodity indeed. As the Minoans at Praissos just 0.5 km away numbered 20,000 some 4000 years BC it’s fairly obvious that they farmed the area where our groves are. There’s something in the atmosphere about this little plot that makes us feel they made this little terrace and grew vegetables or something here some 6000 years ago. We now call it “The Orchard Plot” and have augmented the few small olives with half a dozen different varieties of orange trees, a grapefruit, a lemon, two pomegranates, a peach which as I write has burst into flower, a mandarin, a Japanese Loquat, two avocadoes and a walnut. We’ve already got two pears and almond trees. On order are a couple of cherries and a brace of nectarines, so hopefully, in about 5 years, we won’t have to buy any fruit or nuts ever again. The pears, by the way, are this year going to be made into Raki, or “Calvados” as they call pear brandy in Normandy!
The Nebbiola vines will fill up the orchard plot and who knows, in two or three years time we might have our first Barolo wine. Having ordered the grapes and readied the land only then did we do a bit of research on the internet where we read that Barolo is often undrinkable early on, only becoming the king of wines after 20 years in an oak cask! Ah well, it’s good to have long term goals to live for.
This time of year is decidedly the most beautiful in the groves. The olives, peaches and almonds are in blossom, with the wild pears and soon the cultivated pears to come. Everywhere is amazingly green with a luminescence rarely seen anywhere else. As our land has never seen weed killer the profusion of wildflowers is astonishing and every day sees a new variety of flower emerge. There is a clover-type plant that is everywhere and produces thousands of yellow flowers. Anenomes abound in various forms. There are a profusion of orchids, particularly “bee” orchids, tiny flowers that look just like bumble bees. We are reminded of the old water-meadows in England before the advent of corporate prairie farming and the mass chemicalisation of once rich and verdant land.
One of our neighbouring farmers (downhill from us, thankfully) is still sold on the idea that herbicides are a great idea. His groves are now barren earth, with not a flower or a blade of grass in sight. Strangely, as you walk through them there is a marked absence of birdsong too. We imagine that the lack of vegetation means that there is no habitat for the insect life on which the birds feed, and so the birds go elsewhere. “Our” badgers, that have a large and well established set in one of our groves, probably ignore the place too , as there would be nothing there for them to eat . On our groves, conversely, we often see a circle of trodden-down vegetation around the trees, left there by the badgers as they search for their evening meal. We know that farmers got sold on the idea of an easy life with the products of the chemical giants, and more certainty of crop yields with the use of herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilisers, but the environmental cost is frightening. Unsuspecting consumers buy the oil produced by olive trees farmed by tens of thousands of these “chemical” olive farmers across Europe and elsewhere never fully comprehending the chemical cocktails they might contain. As with other supposedly “good for you“ fruits and vegetables produced with intensive use of fungicides, pesticides and herbicides and with chemical fertilisers there must, one would imagine, be a negative health impact over time? Olive oil consumers tend to imagine that they are keeping themselves healthy and in reality, unless the oil is organic, are consuming who knows what residual chemicals?
To spot olive trees that are spared the chemicals, look for string tied from branch to branch around the perimeter of the grove, or a red striped plastic band. The olives from these trees are often the ones used to produce oil for family consumption. Make a friend of the farmer and if they are anything like the farmers around Sitia they’ll probably give you some of this most precious commodity.
“” as we say here in Crete. Happy Easter
Still picking!!!
The life and times of an olive farmer (and his wife!)
For the uninitiated, “Akoma?” is Greek for “still?” We got to hear “akoma?” an awful lot from our neighbouring farmers and friends as our harvesting, begun on December 11th, dragged on through January and finally ended, with a groan and a whimper, on February 4th.
At the beginning of December, as our first harvest approached, we were full of uncertainty, indecision - and our usual lack of planning. Our first harvest. Should we hire labour, or do it ourselves? Could we do it ourselves? Which nets should we buy, and how many? Should we bag the olives up in sacks, or get the new fangled plastic boxes? What generator should we buy to power the picking sticks? Which picking sticks should we buy? Where should we get our olives pressed, and how should we go about that? What colour should the olives be when you pick them? How long have we got before the wind blows them off the trees? And so on and so on.
We began with the generator. Fortunately, the guy in the shop spoke reasonable English and was someone we’d met a year ago at our first “Kazarni”. Lord only knows what impression he’d gained of us. Anyway, we took his advice and plumped for the “Robin”, relatively inexpensive, everybody uses them, they don’t go wrong. “Robin”, as we naturally call him, burbles along merrily all day without a hitch, is easy to start and economical to run. He’s not so big and heavy as some of the others we’d looked at, which we later discovered was a true blessing.
From the same chap we bought the picking “sticks”. The more usual stick, about 2 metres long with a rotating crosspiece on the end with 15cm nylon flails, whizzes around and beats the olives into submission, knocking them down onto the nets spread out around the tree. Alas, they also beat the leaves off, leaving the tree with a recovery job to do. We chose instead a new type which looks about the same, but at the ends of the crosspiece a sort of globe of stiff rubber fingers sticks out. They spin, but as soon as they meet resistance in the tree they reverberate back and forth, shaking and knocking the olives off but mercifully almost no leaves. They arouse a great deal of interest from other farmers, such that we’ve been stopped in the street quite a few times for an opinion on them, expressed with much sign language of course.
We bought six 12 x 6 metre nets (not enough , but at c. 50 Euro a throw we resented the idea of buying more) and in the end opted for sacks, because everyone else does and at 60 lepta each they were a give away compared to 6.50 Euro for the boxes which held only half the weight.
So , we were (nearly) kitted up. I say nearly , because it’s only after you’ve picked a few trees that you realise that an olive, travelling at c.40 km/h straight into your eye is not funny. Safety glasses!
The first of our groves we’d elected to pick has about 200 trees, 40 of them very small but the rest too big and overgrown. The grove runs on a steep slope for two thirds of its length, then terraces form the last third. Access for the pick-up consists of a place to park at the top, and a muddy track at the bottom which we’d made earlier in the year and which ,if there’s been no rain, lets you get about half way up. This, we realised quickly, is key information. If you’re fifty metres from the truck and it’s uphill, everything you pick has to go on your back at the end of the day. Now we know how Sherpas feel.
Our little routine for each day went as follows: Up at 7.15, we first walk out onto our balcony in Sitia and look up the valley to where our land can be seen and check it’s not raining. If it is, then it’s back to bed (hurrah!), if not Anne makes the tea, makes up the flasks and our elevenses (toast with olive oil for me, marmalade for her) and our picnic lunch. I moan and groan, drink tea and smoke until I feel human. If Anne hadn’t been there cracking the whip half the harvest would have rotted on the trees. Then it’s cart the sticks and bags down to the pick-up. We keep “Robin” in the front seat over night, so he has to be hauled out and tied up in the back. I did suggest at one time that it would save me a lifting job if Anne would ride in the back of the truck, but for some reason she told me to “go away”!
Tie the sticks in, check we’ve got petrol in the can for “Robin”, and off we go. Fifteen minutes drive brings us to the spring where we stop and fill up our water bottles for the day, then 3 minutes more and we’re there. Unload “Robin”, the sticks and the water and lunch stuff and carry heave and pull it all to where we’d left the nets the previous day and we’re ready to start.
Our very first day of picking started with a shock. When you buy your nets they come wrapped in a tight bale, deceptively heavy. We’d left the bale on the grove the day before in the wheelbarrow on the steep slope where we were due to start. On arrival that morning I’d climbed out of Hank (the pick-up!) and gone to the spot. The barrow was lying on it’s side. The nets had gone.
“We’ve been robbed!” I shouted. (I’ve deleted several less than savoury words here for the benefit of our more sensitive readers) “ Some (body) has stolen our nets. 300 Euro down the drain.” My good wife , ever the calming influence, simply looked around and pointed to the bale of nets 50 metres down the hill. During the night the barrow had decided that gravity was right after all and it ought to fall over, the bale following the same argument and rolling down the hill.
After lugging them back up the hill we unpacked and set out the nets, learning almost immediately that a) this is harder than it looks, especially on sloping, wet and weedy ground, b) that getting the nets right is absolutely vital or you’ll lose half of what you pick, and c) that dew-damp ground turns into a ski slope once a net’s on it. From then on we each of us fell over at least once a day. How we survived without a sprain or a fracture we’ll never know. A laugh when it happens, though.
We started “Robin”, connected our picker wires to the terminals and got stuck in. 8 hours later we’d picked about 75 kilos of olives. Two days later we’d picked four full sacks. We did get quicker!
For anyone thinking of losing their wits and trying olive farming for fun or profit (ha!) please, before you buy, look closely at the steepness of the land and the access for your vehicle. I carry half sacks of olives (about 30 kilos) to the pick up. The distance averages about 40 metres but at times has been 70 metres, straight uphill. The first trip is bad enough. If you’ve picked 8 half sacks in a day and have to heave and pull a generator over the same bumpy ground it all becomes something of a trial.
A few days before we’d started we’d made arrangements with an olive press where, as luck would have it, the office is managed by the lovely Maria, who speaks great English. The press is ideal for us. With their modern “Alfa Laval” machinery they can batch process even small amounts of olives (so our oil isn’t mixed with anyone else’s) and they’re getting certified to process organic olives, for which we’re heading . Our first batch for pressing, a measly four sacks marked as ours with a spray painted orange “W” on each sack , looked pathetic and lonely stacked on a pallet under the lemon tree which became “our” spot at the press. Everyone else seemed to turn up with a pick-up ridiculously overloaded , with 20 or 30 sacks flattening the suspension. Needless to say, we felt pretty small beer in this company.
The atmosphere at the press is, generally, pretty grumpy. Possibly because this is a poor year for olives, more likely because when you go to the press after a hard days picking you’ve hardly the energy to smile. And, like small farmers the world over, all the farmers know that they’ll make virtually nothing for their efforts, the real profit lying much further up the food chain. For us, being the oddity of being English amongst an almost exclusively old-Greek-farmer-family-been-here-for-generations crowd, perhaps it was worse. “They’ll get used to us in 20 or 30 years” I said, to encourage Anne.
The pressing process began with our olives being tipped into the big hopper then carried on the conveyor belt to a blower that separated the leaves, then into a bath for a wash, then weighed in another hopper, then piped into the first part of the press where they were mashed up and churned. After about 40 minutes we lifted the lid on the churning machine. Puddles of bright green olive oil had begun to appear. When ready, the pulp was piped to a separator that took out the solids, then piped to a centrifuge from whence the oil appeared. Our excitement mounted as the process went on until, moment of moments, our incredibly luminous bright green cloudy oil emerged from the pipes. A year’s hard graft had gone into this moment. The acidity, we learned was well below 0.3, the best of extra virgin oils. The taste, we found out that evening, was sublime. We’d lucked out in buying, before we knew anything about olives, trees that produce olives which produce a kilo of great oil from every 4.5 kilos of olives picked. It can be as low as 10 to one.
Of course, what began as an exciting and daunting leap into the unknown quickly became a drudgery, an effort, and back-achingly hard work. We picked only on dry days, sometimes managing only half a day but rarely breaking for more than 20 minutes for our picnic lunch. There are of course compensations. It’s cheaper and more healthy than joining a gym. Our groves, high up the valley side, give commanding views across the incredibly green valley of olive groves, interspersed with stately spires of Cypress and the clustered white houses of villages clinging to the hillside opposite. To the left the mountains gain in altitude and majesty as they head for the south coast, to the right the valley sweeps down for 8 kilometres to Sitia and the sea, of which we have a nice view. We can hear other families picking their olives right across the valley, we get beeped at by all the farmers that drive past on the “main” road (one vehicle every half hour!). Otherwise, it’s just us , the birdsong, the plaintive calls of the buzzards riding a thermal overhead, the sunshine and a pervading sense of peace and serenity that seems to inhabit this place, occupied and farmed for 6000 years.
We don’t, by the way, know most of the farmers that beep their horns. But we know they know of us. The village grapevine of gossip means they all know we’re the crazy English. They’ll know who we bought the groves from, for how much, what our trees are like, how we measure up in farming terms. In a kindly way they’re watching over us, dropping hints and tips when we meet, making suggestions, giving praise where due, surprising us with their intimate knowledge of every inch of our groves. A lot of youngsters locally can’t wait to get away from the lives their parents have lived. We guess it’s nice for them to see people coming here who can appreciate it for what it is.
By February the fourth it was no longer “Akoma?” but “Telios!”, The End! We’d stuck it out, and with a little help from our friends (especially the stalwart Danny) we’d picked 4,600 kilos of olives, and pressed just over a 1000 kilos of oil. For those of a mathematical turn of mind, that’s 153 x 30 kilo sacks hauled up the slopes. We’ve hardly argued at all, laughed a lot, and only fallen out of one tree.
At the current price of 2.9 Euro a litre, we won’t even cover our costs for the year, but the sense of achievement, somehow, makes up for it.
The life and times of an olive farmer (and his wife!)
For the uninitiated, “Akoma?” is Greek for “still?” We got to hear “akoma?” an awful lot from our neighbouring farmers and friends as our harvesting, begun on December 11th, dragged on through January and finally ended, with a groan and a whimper, on February 4th.
At the beginning of December, as our first harvest approached, we were full of uncertainty, indecision - and our usual lack of planning. Our first harvest. Should we hire labour, or do it ourselves? Could we do it ourselves? Which nets should we buy, and how many? Should we bag the olives up in sacks, or get the new fangled plastic boxes? What generator should we buy to power the picking sticks? Which picking sticks should we buy? Where should we get our olives pressed, and how should we go about that? What colour should the olives be when you pick them? How long have we got before the wind blows them off the trees? And so on and so on.
We began with the generator. Fortunately, the guy in the shop spoke reasonable English and was someone we’d met a year ago at our first “Kazarni”. Lord only knows what impression he’d gained of us. Anyway, we took his advice and plumped for the “Robin”, relatively inexpensive, everybody uses them, they don’t go wrong. “Robin”, as we naturally call him, burbles along merrily all day without a hitch, is easy to start and economical to run. He’s not so big and heavy as some of the others we’d looked at, which we later discovered was a true blessing.
From the same chap we bought the picking “sticks”. The more usual stick, about 2 metres long with a rotating crosspiece on the end with 15cm nylon flails, whizzes around and beats the olives into submission, knocking them down onto the nets spread out around the tree. Alas, they also beat the leaves off, leaving the tree with a recovery job to do. We chose instead a new type which looks about the same, but at the ends of the crosspiece a sort of globe of stiff rubber fingers sticks out. They spin, but as soon as they meet resistance in the tree they reverberate back and forth, shaking and knocking the olives off but mercifully almost no leaves. They arouse a great deal of interest from other farmers, such that we’ve been stopped in the street quite a few times for an opinion on them, expressed with much sign language of course.
We bought six 12 x 6 metre nets (not enough , but at c. 50 Euro a throw we resented the idea of buying more) and in the end opted for sacks, because everyone else does and at 60 lepta each they were a give away compared to 6.50 Euro for the boxes which held only half the weight.
So , we were (nearly) kitted up. I say nearly , because it’s only after you’ve picked a few trees that you realise that an olive, travelling at c.40 km/h straight into your eye is not funny. Safety glasses!
The first of our groves we’d elected to pick has about 200 trees, 40 of them very small but the rest too big and overgrown. The grove runs on a steep slope for two thirds of its length, then terraces form the last third. Access for the pick-up consists of a place to park at the top, and a muddy track at the bottom which we’d made earlier in the year and which ,if there’s been no rain, lets you get about half way up. This, we realised quickly, is key information. If you’re fifty metres from the truck and it’s uphill, everything you pick has to go on your back at the end of the day. Now we know how Sherpas feel.
Our little routine for each day went as follows: Up at 7.15, we first walk out onto our balcony in Sitia and look up the valley to where our land can be seen and check it’s not raining. If it is, then it’s back to bed (hurrah!), if not Anne makes the tea, makes up the flasks and our elevenses (toast with olive oil for me, marmalade for her) and our picnic lunch. I moan and groan, drink tea and smoke until I feel human. If Anne hadn’t been there cracking the whip half the harvest would have rotted on the trees. Then it’s cart the sticks and bags down to the pick-up. We keep “Robin” in the front seat over night, so he has to be hauled out and tied up in the back. I did suggest at one time that it would save me a lifting job if Anne would ride in the back of the truck, but for some reason she told me to “go away”!
Tie the sticks in, check we’ve got petrol in the can for “Robin”, and off we go. Fifteen minutes drive brings us to the spring where we stop and fill up our water bottles for the day, then 3 minutes more and we’re there. Unload “Robin”, the sticks and the water and lunch stuff and carry heave and pull it all to where we’d left the nets the previous day and we’re ready to start.
Our very first day of picking started with a shock. When you buy your nets they come wrapped in a tight bale, deceptively heavy. We’d left the bale on the grove the day before in the wheelbarrow on the steep slope where we were due to start. On arrival that morning I’d climbed out of Hank (the pick-up!) and gone to the spot. The barrow was lying on it’s side. The nets had gone.
“We’ve been robbed!” I shouted. (I’ve deleted several less than savoury words here for the benefit of our more sensitive readers) “ Some (body) has stolen our nets. 300 Euro down the drain.” My good wife , ever the calming influence, simply looked around and pointed to the bale of nets 50 metres down the hill. During the night the barrow had decided that gravity was right after all and it ought to fall over, the bale following the same argument and rolling down the hill.
After lugging them back up the hill we unpacked and set out the nets, learning almost immediately that a) this is harder than it looks, especially on sloping, wet and weedy ground, b) that getting the nets right is absolutely vital or you’ll lose half of what you pick, and c) that dew-damp ground turns into a ski slope once a net’s on it. From then on we each of us fell over at least once a day. How we survived without a sprain or a fracture we’ll never know. A laugh when it happens, though.
We started “Robin”, connected our picker wires to the terminals and got stuck in. 8 hours later we’d picked about 75 kilos of olives. Two days later we’d picked four full sacks. We did get quicker!
For anyone thinking of losing their wits and trying olive farming for fun or profit (ha!) please, before you buy, look closely at the steepness of the land and the access for your vehicle. I carry half sacks of olives (about 30 kilos) to the pick up. The distance averages about 40 metres but at times has been 70 metres, straight uphill. The first trip is bad enough. If you’ve picked 8 half sacks in a day and have to heave and pull a generator over the same bumpy ground it all becomes something of a trial.
A few days before we’d started we’d made arrangements with an olive press where, as luck would have it, the office is managed by the lovely Maria, who speaks great English. The press is ideal for us. With their modern “Alfa Laval” machinery they can batch process even small amounts of olives (so our oil isn’t mixed with anyone else’s) and they’re getting certified to process organic olives, for which we’re heading . Our first batch for pressing, a measly four sacks marked as ours with a spray painted orange “W” on each sack , looked pathetic and lonely stacked on a pallet under the lemon tree which became “our” spot at the press. Everyone else seemed to turn up with a pick-up ridiculously overloaded , with 20 or 30 sacks flattening the suspension. Needless to say, we felt pretty small beer in this company.
The atmosphere at the press is, generally, pretty grumpy. Possibly because this is a poor year for olives, more likely because when you go to the press after a hard days picking you’ve hardly the energy to smile. And, like small farmers the world over, all the farmers know that they’ll make virtually nothing for their efforts, the real profit lying much further up the food chain. For us, being the oddity of being English amongst an almost exclusively old-Greek-farmer-family-been-here-for-generations crowd, perhaps it was worse. “They’ll get used to us in 20 or 30 years” I said, to encourage Anne.
The pressing process began with our olives being tipped into the big hopper then carried on the conveyor belt to a blower that separated the leaves, then into a bath for a wash, then weighed in another hopper, then piped into the first part of the press where they were mashed up and churned. After about 40 minutes we lifted the lid on the churning machine. Puddles of bright green olive oil had begun to appear. When ready, the pulp was piped to a separator that took out the solids, then piped to a centrifuge from whence the oil appeared. Our excitement mounted as the process went on until, moment of moments, our incredibly luminous bright green cloudy oil emerged from the pipes. A year’s hard graft had gone into this moment. The acidity, we learned was well below 0.3, the best of extra virgin oils. The taste, we found out that evening, was sublime. We’d lucked out in buying, before we knew anything about olives, trees that produce olives which produce a kilo of great oil from every 4.5 kilos of olives picked. It can be as low as 10 to one.
Of course, what began as an exciting and daunting leap into the unknown quickly became a drudgery, an effort, and back-achingly hard work. We picked only on dry days, sometimes managing only half a day but rarely breaking for more than 20 minutes for our picnic lunch. There are of course compensations. It’s cheaper and more healthy than joining a gym. Our groves, high up the valley side, give commanding views across the incredibly green valley of olive groves, interspersed with stately spires of Cypress and the clustered white houses of villages clinging to the hillside opposite. To the left the mountains gain in altitude and majesty as they head for the south coast, to the right the valley sweeps down for 8 kilometres to Sitia and the sea, of which we have a nice view. We can hear other families picking their olives right across the valley, we get beeped at by all the farmers that drive past on the “main” road (one vehicle every half hour!). Otherwise, it’s just us , the birdsong, the plaintive calls of the buzzards riding a thermal overhead, the sunshine and a pervading sense of peace and serenity that seems to inhabit this place, occupied and farmed for 6000 years.
We don’t, by the way, know most of the farmers that beep their horns. But we know they know of us. The village grapevine of gossip means they all know we’re the crazy English. They’ll know who we bought the groves from, for how much, what our trees are like, how we measure up in farming terms. In a kindly way they’re watching over us, dropping hints and tips when we meet, making suggestions, giving praise where due, surprising us with their intimate knowledge of every inch of our groves. A lot of youngsters locally can’t wait to get away from the lives their parents have lived. We guess it’s nice for them to see people coming here who can appreciate it for what it is.
By February the fourth it was no longer “Akoma?” but “Telios!”, The End! We’d stuck it out, and with a little help from our friends (especially the stalwart Danny) we’d picked 4,600 kilos of olives, and pressed just over a 1000 kilos of oil. For those of a mathematical turn of mind, that’s 153 x 30 kilo sacks hauled up the slopes. We’ve hardly argued at all, laughed a lot, and only fallen out of one tree.
At the current price of 2.9 Euro a litre, we won’t even cover our costs for the year, but the sense of achievement, somehow, makes up for it.
Summer's coming
The life and times of an olive farmer and his wife!
Summer’s coming and we olive farmers are preparing for the watering that’s needed during the hotter months. An olive tree will survive and even prosper with no water at all for months on end but to ensure the maximum quantity of oil one needs to sparingly apply judicious amounts of the wet stuff at the right times.
It’s not a case of simply turning on a tap and sitting about reading a novel for a few hours then turning it off. The black plastic pipes you will notice criss-crossing the olive groves develop all sorts of problems over the year and need maintenance if disaster or inefficient usage is to be avoided. This year , before I can begin watering I guess I’ve got about four or five days of repair work to do; mending splits, clearing the watering holes in the pipes (which get clogged up over the winter), checking that the wire ties that close the end of each run are in place (if they’re not, the pipe will have a mouse’s nest in it or be full of snails), changing some of the junctions where the smaller pipes join the main feed.
The water comes from a pump house at the top of bore hole which delves down 300 meters or so into the mountainside and is fed, under huge pressure, through the complicated tap arrangements into the c. 10cm diameter mains pipe. I understand the pressures involved following a little accident last year! I’d forgotten that I should open a certain feed pipe off the mains to let the water go down to one of my groves. I turned on the main tap (always accompanied by a scary and very loud rushing noise!) and began to wander the 100 yards or so down the road to the grove I was trying to water. Suddenly there was the most almighty explosion and a 40 meter high geyser of water appeared (making, I noticed, some nice little rainbows), drenching the road. The bang echoed and reverberated around the valley. It took me a few seconds, in my daze, to realise that this was something I’d done and it wasn’t something I could watch with interest but something I had to do something about. I quickly turned off the mains tap (more scary noises) and ran to inspect the damage. Finding the main pipe had split, I realised that I would have to repair the section before the next user turned up at their allotted time.
Now, being new to all this I had no idea how to do the job nor what tools I’d need. I did understand that I’d have to cut out the damaged piece and either insert a new piece with a couple of unions, or pull the ends together and use one union. I took down the number from the side of the pipe and rushed off to the shop in Sitia.
About the tools you need for the job; one of them is a blowtorch, another is an empty Mythos bottle (Amstel won’t do, apparently, it has to be Mythos). What you do is use the blow torch to heat up and soften the pipe that you’ve cut, then use the neck of the Mythos bottle to open up the aperture a bit with a sort of round and round motion so that you can force the steel union into the pipe , then clip it into place with a great big version of those little cir-clip thingies that you see on the radiator pipes in cars. Easy, if only the guy in the shop had told me so.
Back at the pipe I used a hacksaw to cut out the offending piece (not too hard, that bit) then made to push the steel union in. Of course, it wouldn’t go! Why ,I’d imagined it would just push fit! Without a lump hammer to hand, I picked up a rock and started hammering away and quickly realised that I’d got something of a job to do . Over the next four hours (yes, four hours) in the blazing sun I earned myself as fine a collection of blisters as you could hope to see but eventually fixed the flipping thing. (It takes 20 mins and no effort with the right tools! That‘s what the empty Mythos bottle is doing in the pick-up, your honour….)
Back to the tap I went to test the thing and worrying that I’d bodged it up. In fact, so concerned was I that I clean forgot to open the feed pipe that I’d missed before! In trepidation I opened the mains tap again and the thing blew up ,again, this time right underneath me and giving me the most almighty scare and a tremendous soaking to boot.
I guess if there’d been wise old Greek olive farmers about they’d have had a great laugh at the amateur Englishman and his elementary misunderstanding of the watering system that they’ve used for years, and they would have been right to. I have a good laugh about it now myself, and towards the end of the summer last year I had a small chuckle when a familiar bang echoed around the valley, only this time it wasn’t me that had done it…
We’ve got to run a new feed pipe soon to the little vineyard on our orchard plot. It’s got to come from the end of one of our existing pipes and travel about a hundred meters across a steep, thorn bush covered hillside to get to where it’s needed. What you get used to in this olive farming lark is skin covered in scratches and trousers and shirts getting shredded on a regular basis. Fortunately, we bought really stout leather work gloves in England last year (at £7 a pair!) that are resistant to the worst of the thorns, so at least our hands are spared.
As I write I’m keeping a close eye on some logs that are lying about on a couple of groves adjacent to ours. The farmer has done a major prune, cleared away all the brushwood but left his firewood on the site to be collected later. Last year we did the same thing and turning up one day found that every log had become infested with a type of burrowing beetle, leaving little holes about every 20cm or so and little piles of sawdust where they’d gone in. On checking the books, we discovered that they lay their eggs in the cut timber and some days later (usually about 20) out come thousands of dear little beetles that promptly drill themselves into the nearest olive trees, (which, in the case of this guy’s woodpiles, happen to be our trees). In Spain there are some villages where the tradition of storing wood piles outside the back door means that trees for a hundred meters or so are infested with the little beauties and unproductive as a result.
The life and times of an olive farmer and his wife!
Summer’s coming and we olive farmers are preparing for the watering that’s needed during the hotter months. An olive tree will survive and even prosper with no water at all for months on end but to ensure the maximum quantity of oil one needs to sparingly apply judicious amounts of the wet stuff at the right times.
It’s not a case of simply turning on a tap and sitting about reading a novel for a few hours then turning it off. The black plastic pipes you will notice criss-crossing the olive groves develop all sorts of problems over the year and need maintenance if disaster or inefficient usage is to be avoided. This year , before I can begin watering I guess I’ve got about four or five days of repair work to do; mending splits, clearing the watering holes in the pipes (which get clogged up over the winter), checking that the wire ties that close the end of each run are in place (if they’re not, the pipe will have a mouse’s nest in it or be full of snails), changing some of the junctions where the smaller pipes join the main feed.
The water comes from a pump house at the top of bore hole which delves down 300 meters or so into the mountainside and is fed, under huge pressure, through the complicated tap arrangements into the c. 10cm diameter mains pipe. I understand the pressures involved following a little accident last year! I’d forgotten that I should open a certain feed pipe off the mains to let the water go down to one of my groves. I turned on the main tap (always accompanied by a scary and very loud rushing noise!) and began to wander the 100 yards or so down the road to the grove I was trying to water. Suddenly there was the most almighty explosion and a 40 meter high geyser of water appeared (making, I noticed, some nice little rainbows), drenching the road. The bang echoed and reverberated around the valley. It took me a few seconds, in my daze, to realise that this was something I’d done and it wasn’t something I could watch with interest but something I had to do something about. I quickly turned off the mains tap (more scary noises) and ran to inspect the damage. Finding the main pipe had split, I realised that I would have to repair the section before the next user turned up at their allotted time.
Now, being new to all this I had no idea how to do the job nor what tools I’d need. I did understand that I’d have to cut out the damaged piece and either insert a new piece with a couple of unions, or pull the ends together and use one union. I took down the number from the side of the pipe and rushed off to the shop in Sitia.
About the tools you need for the job; one of them is a blowtorch, another is an empty Mythos bottle (Amstel won’t do, apparently, it has to be Mythos). What you do is use the blow torch to heat up and soften the pipe that you’ve cut, then use the neck of the Mythos bottle to open up the aperture a bit with a sort of round and round motion so that you can force the steel union into the pipe , then clip it into place with a great big version of those little cir-clip thingies that you see on the radiator pipes in cars. Easy, if only the guy in the shop had told me so.
Back at the pipe I used a hacksaw to cut out the offending piece (not too hard, that bit) then made to push the steel union in. Of course, it wouldn’t go! Why ,I’d imagined it would just push fit! Without a lump hammer to hand, I picked up a rock and started hammering away and quickly realised that I’d got something of a job to do . Over the next four hours (yes, four hours) in the blazing sun I earned myself as fine a collection of blisters as you could hope to see but eventually fixed the flipping thing. (It takes 20 mins and no effort with the right tools! That‘s what the empty Mythos bottle is doing in the pick-up, your honour….)
Back to the tap I went to test the thing and worrying that I’d bodged it up. In fact, so concerned was I that I clean forgot to open the feed pipe that I’d missed before! In trepidation I opened the mains tap again and the thing blew up ,again, this time right underneath me and giving me the most almighty scare and a tremendous soaking to boot.
I guess if there’d been wise old Greek olive farmers about they’d have had a great laugh at the amateur Englishman and his elementary misunderstanding of the watering system that they’ve used for years, and they would have been right to. I have a good laugh about it now myself, and towards the end of the summer last year I had a small chuckle when a familiar bang echoed around the valley, only this time it wasn’t me that had done it…
We’ve got to run a new feed pipe soon to the little vineyard on our orchard plot. It’s got to come from the end of one of our existing pipes and travel about a hundred meters across a steep, thorn bush covered hillside to get to where it’s needed. What you get used to in this olive farming lark is skin covered in scratches and trousers and shirts getting shredded on a regular basis. Fortunately, we bought really stout leather work gloves in England last year (at £7 a pair!) that are resistant to the worst of the thorns, so at least our hands are spared.
As I write I’m keeping a close eye on some logs that are lying about on a couple of groves adjacent to ours. The farmer has done a major prune, cleared away all the brushwood but left his firewood on the site to be collected later. Last year we did the same thing and turning up one day found that every log had become infested with a type of burrowing beetle, leaving little holes about every 20cm or so and little piles of sawdust where they’d gone in. On checking the books, we discovered that they lay their eggs in the cut timber and some days later (usually about 20) out come thousands of dear little beetles that promptly drill themselves into the nearest olive trees, (which, in the case of this guy’s woodpiles, happen to be our trees). In Spain there are some villages where the tradition of storing wood piles outside the back door means that trees for a hundred meters or so are infested with the little beauties and unproductive as a result.
Getting away from prison England
Three years ago I had absolutely no idea that by November 2007 I would have been living in Crete for over a year and a half, that I’d wake up to the sight and sound of the sea each morning, that I’d be seriously considering buying a donkey because, of all things, I’d become an olive farmer.
Back then in the UK our son had left uni and effectively left home, our daughter was at uni but was probably the most travelled and independent kid in the world. We could cut the apron strings and fly.
I was desperate to get out of the place before I went mad. Or got mad. Perhaps it was all the security cameras? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you has always been my adage.
Other than wanting to escape, I had no fixed plans……..
The first job was to browbeat the wife, God bless her long suffering soul, into joining me in my insanity. “The kids are grown up “, the argument went, “lets go on an adventure. Sell all this rubbish we’ve managed to surround ourselves with and go to India and buy a tea plantation, go to Italy and do up old houses, something, anything other than another 15 years of this until we retire, then a few years weeing into a chair and dribbling in some care home until we die At which time Tony Blair or whichever cloned fascist is in power at the time will tax us again“. Of course, I had to repeat myself a few times.
Eventually, she bought it. If only, I suspect, to get a little peace.
Years ago we used to dream of going to France. Learnt the lingo, cruised the internet for old farmhouses for £500 to renovate, took our holidays with Eurocamp Then we realised that every other Brit was doing the same, Brittany was becoming “Little Britainy” and the French, quite rightly, were getting fed up of “les rosbifs.” And La Belle France ,as the years progressed ,was becoming more and more like the UK anyway. So where?
Like so many of the friends we have here in Crete we sold everything we had, went through the trauma of a major life laundry (“I’m not selling my sofas!“) put a few books and photographs (and the kitchen table our kids had grown up sitting around and painting on) in the back of a van and set off.
Unlike those friends , although we had a vague idea we were heading for Crete we weren’t certain. Mostly because we’d never set foot here. Indeed the only experience of Greece we had was a week in Kephalonia some years back, and then only my wife and the kids went. So the future was a little hazy.
I won’t bore you with details of the road trip because I guess if you’re reading this you’ve probably done the same or similar. What I will say is that when we emerged from the ferry at Souda bay we were still talking. But only just.
The van, by this time, had become “Michael”. We’d decorated him with flowers on the basis that if thieves thought it was a hippy van they wouldn’t bother trying to steal the contents. He was terrifically, dangerously and almost certainly illegally overloaded, creaked and groaned around every bend, lurched frighteningly at every rut in the road, and became our best and most loyal friend.
Of course Crete did everything it could to put us off right from the start. We couldn’t have felt less welcome if we’d parachuted in with the 31st Sturmabteilung (or whatever) in 1942. The wind was giving the island some serious attention, it was raining and cloudy, the roads were full of potholes, everyone was honking their horns when they passed Michael (which we thought was some sort of aggressive behaviour at the time) and when we got to Iraklion we were greeted with a fifty meter long pile of stinking rubbish in the street. We were getting to the point of turning back at this stage. What we didn’t know, of course, is that the rubbish was due to a strike by the collectors (this was April 06). We thought it was usually like that. Oh my God, what had we done?
We pointed Michael in the direction of Sitia on a whim and because we’d read there were already lots of Brits in the West of the island and what would be the point of joining them. If we did that we might end up playing golf, or spending our evenings in Brit pubs drinking Tetley, watching Corrie and eating sausage and mash. Heaven forefend, although the sausage and mash sounds good.
I’m sorry , by the way, if you play golf and go to the Red Lion every night. It’s just not for me..
It’s worth noting at this stage that the better half has long held an entirely unwarranted hatred of Wales. All those dark, lowering mountains. The rain. Dark little villages. I’ve grown to dislike the place myself. If you’ve ever had occasion to travel from Agios Nikolaos to Sitia on a dismal and rainy April evening you’ll know what I ’m driving at. Needless to say, things were a bit grim in the van. Michael was making the best job he could of pulling 3.5 tonnes up steep mountain roads round S bend after S bend without grumbling, trying to keep our spirits up.We drove into Sitia down the Iraklion road, not it’s prettiest aspect, took one look and kept going.
We carried on further east to Palekastro.
Now, you know when you go into the wrong pub and everything goes eerily quiet and all eyes are focussed on little old you? That’s how we felt driving through the square in Palekastro in our hippied-up van. Everyone stared at us . It was more than a little unnerving. Still, it was late and we had to find a bed for the night. Wearily and miserably we booked into the Hellas hotel in the square in Palekastro and went to bed. I can’t remember if we talked or not, but things were decidedly other than great. (Many times since we’ve been sitting in the square enjoying a beer with people who have become friends and we’ve stared at people passing through. It’s what you do.)
Isn’t it funny what a bit of sunshine can do to the spirits? The next morning the big friendly chap in the sky beamed down on us and all seemed to be just that little bit better. Oddly, it’s been pretty much a little bit better every day since.
We met an English musician who makes ends meet selling houses and who, in chronological order, became our third friend in Crete. This , in hindsight, was the beginning of the process that led to me thinking four hours on a steep mountainside hacking at huge “weeds” in the blazing sun was a time well spent and fun too! I recall thinking “Hey, we could probably afford a few olive trees…..”
The “fellow-escapees” we come across in our neck of the woods tend to fall into three categories:
Category a)… Great big chunk of cash in the bank and a nice pension ,thanks very much.
Category b)… As above, but with a less than great chunk of cash.
Category c) …, as b), but without the pension.
We, most decidedly, fall into category c). So, as we became more familiar with what was available for what sort of money we had to think of some way to add to our little all by way of generating an income. Two options offered themselves. Option one, buy an old house, renovate and restore it, sell it for a healthy profit and do it all again. There are still lots of empty old houses here in East Crete and in fact doing this sort of thing had long been in my mind. In fact nearly all of our English friends are doing just that. Option two; buy a few olive trees and at the same time make sure that the land is build-able on and in a spot where people might like to live , then sell off-plan as we sure can’t afford to build them first.
One day in June 06 we were gently motoring around the area and we happened upon the most beautiful valley close to a hamlet called Agios Spiridon. Studded with stately cypress trees, majestic mountain tops in the distance, white villages clinging to the hillsides, the sea glinting in the distance, buzzards idling on a thermal overhead and the greenest place we’d seen in Crete. We fell in love. Funnily enough, just a week or two later we were there again, buying 750 dilapidated olive trees and our own slice of heaven. This was surely no coincidence. Find me an English couple in love with the idea of being an olive farmer and I’ll find you a Spanish, Italian or Greek olive farmer willing to let you find out the hard way just why it is they all live to be a hundred. It’s the exercise, and they‘d rather you did it whilst they use your cash to get a widescreen tv and visit their grandson and his family in New York.
As I guess most readers will know, buying a property in Crete is a journey rather than a transaction. We’ve been farming the groves since January this year, but for various reasons only got the paperwork finally right last week! Over the coming issues I’ll be sharing with you some of the joys of Olive farming, just in case any of you are mad enough to follow suit, and some of the joys of Greek bureaucracy , in case you didn’t know. We are farming biologically, and will share what little learning we have with Crete Courier readers.
Panta geia, panta xara as they say in Agios Spiridon,
“Always health, always joy”.
Back then in the UK our son had left uni and effectively left home, our daughter was at uni but was probably the most travelled and independent kid in the world. We could cut the apron strings and fly.
I was desperate to get out of the place before I went mad. Or got mad. Perhaps it was all the security cameras? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you has always been my adage.
Other than wanting to escape, I had no fixed plans……..
The first job was to browbeat the wife, God bless her long suffering soul, into joining me in my insanity. “The kids are grown up “, the argument went, “lets go on an adventure. Sell all this rubbish we’ve managed to surround ourselves with and go to India and buy a tea plantation, go to Italy and do up old houses, something, anything other than another 15 years of this until we retire, then a few years weeing into a chair and dribbling in some care home until we die At which time Tony Blair or whichever cloned fascist is in power at the time will tax us again“. Of course, I had to repeat myself a few times.
Eventually, she bought it. If only, I suspect, to get a little peace.
Years ago we used to dream of going to France. Learnt the lingo, cruised the internet for old farmhouses for £500 to renovate, took our holidays with Eurocamp Then we realised that every other Brit was doing the same, Brittany was becoming “Little Britainy” and the French, quite rightly, were getting fed up of “les rosbifs.” And La Belle France ,as the years progressed ,was becoming more and more like the UK anyway. So where?
Like so many of the friends we have here in Crete we sold everything we had, went through the trauma of a major life laundry (“I’m not selling my sofas!“) put a few books and photographs (and the kitchen table our kids had grown up sitting around and painting on) in the back of a van and set off.
Unlike those friends , although we had a vague idea we were heading for Crete we weren’t certain. Mostly because we’d never set foot here. Indeed the only experience of Greece we had was a week in Kephalonia some years back, and then only my wife and the kids went. So the future was a little hazy.
I won’t bore you with details of the road trip because I guess if you’re reading this you’ve probably done the same or similar. What I will say is that when we emerged from the ferry at Souda bay we were still talking. But only just.
The van, by this time, had become “Michael”. We’d decorated him with flowers on the basis that if thieves thought it was a hippy van they wouldn’t bother trying to steal the contents. He was terrifically, dangerously and almost certainly illegally overloaded, creaked and groaned around every bend, lurched frighteningly at every rut in the road, and became our best and most loyal friend.
Of course Crete did everything it could to put us off right from the start. We couldn’t have felt less welcome if we’d parachuted in with the 31st Sturmabteilung (or whatever) in 1942. The wind was giving the island some serious attention, it was raining and cloudy, the roads were full of potholes, everyone was honking their horns when they passed Michael (which we thought was some sort of aggressive behaviour at the time) and when we got to Iraklion we were greeted with a fifty meter long pile of stinking rubbish in the street. We were getting to the point of turning back at this stage. What we didn’t know, of course, is that the rubbish was due to a strike by the collectors (this was April 06). We thought it was usually like that. Oh my God, what had we done?
We pointed Michael in the direction of Sitia on a whim and because we’d read there were already lots of Brits in the West of the island and what would be the point of joining them. If we did that we might end up playing golf, or spending our evenings in Brit pubs drinking Tetley, watching Corrie and eating sausage and mash. Heaven forefend, although the sausage and mash sounds good.
I’m sorry , by the way, if you play golf and go to the Red Lion every night. It’s just not for me..
It’s worth noting at this stage that the better half has long held an entirely unwarranted hatred of Wales. All those dark, lowering mountains. The rain. Dark little villages. I’ve grown to dislike the place myself. If you’ve ever had occasion to travel from Agios Nikolaos to Sitia on a dismal and rainy April evening you’ll know what I ’m driving at. Needless to say, things were a bit grim in the van. Michael was making the best job he could of pulling 3.5 tonnes up steep mountain roads round S bend after S bend without grumbling, trying to keep our spirits up.We drove into Sitia down the Iraklion road, not it’s prettiest aspect, took one look and kept going.
We carried on further east to Palekastro.
Now, you know when you go into the wrong pub and everything goes eerily quiet and all eyes are focussed on little old you? That’s how we felt driving through the square in Palekastro in our hippied-up van. Everyone stared at us . It was more than a little unnerving. Still, it was late and we had to find a bed for the night. Wearily and miserably we booked into the Hellas hotel in the square in Palekastro and went to bed. I can’t remember if we talked or not, but things were decidedly other than great. (Many times since we’ve been sitting in the square enjoying a beer with people who have become friends and we’ve stared at people passing through. It’s what you do.)
Isn’t it funny what a bit of sunshine can do to the spirits? The next morning the big friendly chap in the sky beamed down on us and all seemed to be just that little bit better. Oddly, it’s been pretty much a little bit better every day since.
We met an English musician who makes ends meet selling houses and who, in chronological order, became our third friend in Crete. This , in hindsight, was the beginning of the process that led to me thinking four hours on a steep mountainside hacking at huge “weeds” in the blazing sun was a time well spent and fun too! I recall thinking “Hey, we could probably afford a few olive trees…..”
The “fellow-escapees” we come across in our neck of the woods tend to fall into three categories:
Category a)… Great big chunk of cash in the bank and a nice pension ,thanks very much.
Category b)… As above, but with a less than great chunk of cash.
Category c) …, as b), but without the pension.
We, most decidedly, fall into category c). So, as we became more familiar with what was available for what sort of money we had to think of some way to add to our little all by way of generating an income. Two options offered themselves. Option one, buy an old house, renovate and restore it, sell it for a healthy profit and do it all again. There are still lots of empty old houses here in East Crete and in fact doing this sort of thing had long been in my mind. In fact nearly all of our English friends are doing just that. Option two; buy a few olive trees and at the same time make sure that the land is build-able on and in a spot where people might like to live , then sell off-plan as we sure can’t afford to build them first.
One day in June 06 we were gently motoring around the area and we happened upon the most beautiful valley close to a hamlet called Agios Spiridon. Studded with stately cypress trees, majestic mountain tops in the distance, white villages clinging to the hillsides, the sea glinting in the distance, buzzards idling on a thermal overhead and the greenest place we’d seen in Crete. We fell in love. Funnily enough, just a week or two later we were there again, buying 750 dilapidated olive trees and our own slice of heaven. This was surely no coincidence. Find me an English couple in love with the idea of being an olive farmer and I’ll find you a Spanish, Italian or Greek olive farmer willing to let you find out the hard way just why it is they all live to be a hundred. It’s the exercise, and they‘d rather you did it whilst they use your cash to get a widescreen tv and visit their grandson and his family in New York.
As I guess most readers will know, buying a property in Crete is a journey rather than a transaction. We’ve been farming the groves since January this year, but for various reasons only got the paperwork finally right last week! Over the coming issues I’ll be sharing with you some of the joys of Olive farming, just in case any of you are mad enough to follow suit, and some of the joys of Greek bureaucracy , in case you didn’t know. We are farming biologically, and will share what little learning we have with Crete Courier readers.
Panta geia, panta xara as they say in Agios Spiridon,
“Always health, always joy”.
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