$100 dollars a barrel is as nothing to what you will have to pay for a litre of organic first pressing oil.
The mosca olearia has struck and Al Quaida pales into insignificance beside The Fly. Not being able to drive your car is much more bearable than not being able to dress your food.
Don't buy cheap olive oil this year, you won't like what has been pressed into it. Buy walnut.
Later
It couldn't be worse. The olives lie, like heaps of hail, beneath their trees, melting into the ground , skidding beneath boots. Nothing. There will be no work for all the pickers, no work for the mills, for the commercial distributers and for the farming outlets.
So it was duck stuffed with fennel and roasted with all the kitchen garden had to offer; it was wine from Mr HG's father's cellar, red-brown and tasting of violets (though how do they know the taste of violets? Perhaps something is being lost in inner translation here) and, reminded by Elby's delicious menus, apple crumble with quinces from the garden, though we couldn't match the cream.
And then it felt much better and there is to be a bounteous harvest next year, we feel it in our bones.
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13 comments:
Sadly true, HG; we've decided not to pick this year. A neighbour of ours spent 10 days with her fattore and 2 albanians, the net result was 35 litres of rubbish. I estimates she spent £ 300 per litre to get it (not that it matters, she's a trust fund babe).
/plug on
The good news is that we still have 120 litres left of the superb oil from last year, and we are also organic registered!
/plug off
We're 300m. above sea level TT, (I think, I'm not quite up to speed with agriculture and geography things) anyway, high enough, some of it, to have escaped. But there will only be enough for domestic use, and that means finding someone to press it with who hasn't been affected either.
All that work, pruning and ploughing and weed trimming and not using sprays to preserve the status. And I am giving up on thinking deer are Bambis. Once they are there they have to be farmed or all kinds of diseases and starvation sets in; not that I can bring myself to eat venison yet but I will if they don't stop gnawing the young trees.
On the other hand, the tractor shed is regularised, and I had permission to clear woodland that was scrub overgrowing former field and very unlikely to become gladed woodland - a most helpful Forestiere, which was sold well because it had grown in sunlight; I didn't know that there is a differential on the circumstances in which wood grows.
The Albanian discreetly denounced the Rumanian as being a poor worker to Mr HG (they don't speak to me, only him, although the local chaps will chat my ears off).
I shall return to anthropological research, might as well as I'm no good at farming, can't even keep flies off the olives.
(sounds of Archers music..)
Oh TT! I am hoping to score some...? I don't mind collecting it from your inlaws if you can't drop by...:-) Usually I am buying the Lesvian Oil from the Isle of Lesvos in 5 litre tins but the Lesvians will have to try harder to tempt me this year..I bought some Palestinian Olive Oil this summer. No great shakes but ok with their herby dip and fresh rustic bread, like you guys can get. Slaver. I am sorry crop crap.
The deli where I get the Lesvian Oil also sells Lesvian Honey!
Of course you get a nice subsidy from taxpayers via the EU regarless of whether or not you produce any oil.
Lots of people get subsidies from taxpayers and don't do any work at all; some of them never have, 10.07.
I pay taxes in, put in capital, labour, entrepreneurship, I draw out; losing the oil harvest is a misfortune (and not just for the farm), not a rip off.
That TT poetry prize is a bigger honour than I first realized !
It will be savoured accordingly in Schloss Drew
Hope you Tuscans are all suitably diversified: good luck
I pay taxes too and I've got an olive tree (well more of a bush) in my conservatory/patio here in the UK - no fruit this year either, but I have great hopes for next year. How can I get my subsidy from the EU? My daughter also grew a 10 ft sunflower - must be worth something?
Seems unfair that I cannot get subsidies for plants more suited to the British climate - grass and weed payments anyone?
We do gold as well round here ND; gold centre of Italy, not quite paved with it but the factory zone is all gold factories.
that's OK, I'm quite into gold, will do nicely for the next prize
I can recommend Tusc's oil Nick; its hard being a poet these days, but to win in kind is a pleasing thought!
God its hard...
Would you like it struck into a medallion ND?
Around the beginning of the eighties Mr HG's grandmother's farmer's son - who'd set up a gold factory - told us we should buy gold. So we thought 'he should know, go for it.' 'How many kilos?' he asked; it's hard being poor.
It happened again when the oil harvest failed another time; a visiting Texan overheard worried discussions about the oil. 'I didn't realise you have wells' he beamed to Mr HG. So we took him up the hill and showed him where the oil came from.
But a poetry medallion could be managed.
I should wear it always
the doggerel decoration
blog-bling for Poetry-Medallion Man
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