Like most people, I have experienced depression and had a bad patch in my thirties brought on by job stress. So I do know what that feels like. I haven't been depressed, but I've certainly been "blah". Which is my excuse for neglecting to keep this up to date.

The relentless "no rain but not a drought" wore me down, and my summer vegetable garden was mostly a failure as a result. Although I was watering things, the relentless heat took its toll. The main point of my vegetable garden is summer tomatoes, and they all developed leaf curl and died.

In general the place is in reasonable condition, and we sold off most of the sheep, so there wasn't as much for me to do and I slowed down. A lot!

It took an effort to get ready for the olive harvest....I've been preparing for this year's harvest for 6 weeks and we've just finished, and I suddenly have a weight off my back.

So, to backtrack.....two years ago we lost our crop to the Lace Bug plague that affected a lot of north east Victoria. The following year the trees went into recovery mode, and didn't flower. So no crop. No oil for two years and we had to close our olive oil sales, and all of our customers had to find another supplier.

This year the trees did develop a crop, and we've just finished harvesting.

It was good to get things ticking over again, but it was a mediocre result. Around here generally people are seeing a 13% return on the crop....13 litres of oil per 100kg of fruit. That's what we returned. But we didn't actually get a lot of fruit picked on the days. The trees were heavily congested with dead twigs from the Lace Bug die-back, and the tree-shaker shook out as much of that as olives. The trees that actually had a decent volume hung onto their olives. Not everything goes into the net of course, and the biggest trees can throw a lot of olives outside the catchment area.

Olives from a tree bigger than the catchment of the tree shaker..

The real problem was the rate of trees. We spent a lot of time clearing the tree shaker of congested sticks, which slowed down the rate per hour we were clearing trees. (We do use a crude filter over the field bins to sieve out sticks, but that's a manual operations...two/three people scrabbling through mounds of olives pushing them through a grid and throwing away the sticks. But that's after the event...helps at the processing end, but the sticks are already in the shaker catchment by the time we do that manual task.

Tree-shaker paused for yet another twig cleanout.

We were not enthusiastic about having up to start up the retail olive oil side of things again from scratch, and I found a local start-up olive grove who have only just planted new trees. We did a deal, they bought the entire crop from us at a wholesale price. That gives them a chance to get their business going while they wait for their trees to come online. And that means once I deliver the oil to them I've finished ....no markets, no online sales, no deliveries, no sitting in the shed filling bottles.

So its all done. I've been paid, promptly, but this year the costs will be more than the sale price. That is, we lost money on the crop.

I'm OK with that. Its frustrating, but next year will be better!

There's still work to do, of course. The trees I harshly pruned have flourished, and I am optimistic they will produce a good crop next year in a tighter canopy that will all drop into the net. That's work I want to continue. Of the four paddocks of olive trees three have had their gaps filled with new trees. The biggest paddock is waiting for that work, plus I have to decide what to do with the 20 or so trees that have mostly died from Lace Bug damage. Realistically, cutting them down is the best option. While some of them have sprouted new base ( epicormic) shoots, even if these mature into a new trunk it will most likely be at risk of snapping off if the tree ever got to a harvestable/shakeable size.

Still, those olive logs make great firewood!