There are some odd things going on at the moment!

Our trees started blossoming. Its good to see, they are heavily laden with flowers. But its way earlier than normal. For the past few years the trees have started flowering around 21-23 November. This year they started 1 November. One of the reasons our harvest was so mediocre last season was that I deliberately harvested earlier than normal. Its a long story, I've talked about it before, but it was a lesson learned and I swore to not do that again.

So having the trees flower early isn't comforting! On paper I should be planning to harvest next season around 180 days from peak blossom. That's about now plus 6 months, which is notionally 10 May. That would be the earliest we have ever harvested, and just seems wrong. I asked Colin, my previous employer, about it and he pointed out that a heavy crop ripens later than a light crop. If we get enough fruit setting from this high volume of blossom we will probably off-set the early flowering with the late ripeness. Or not! Ar some stage I have to make a decision and book the harvest.

I am still plugging away at the beneficial spray process I started weeks ago. Now its complicated by the flowering trees. It would not be helpful, I think, to successful pollination to be spraying the flowers with a sticky molassess/seasol syrup. So I've modified the spraying I am doing, just aiming for the lower branches and areas with not much flowers. Any recalcitrant trees with no blossom get the full head to toe spray. In doing that, I have seen very little Lacebug. There's been a few pockets and small groups, nothing like the hundreds per tree and three generations which we have seen previously when they are rapidly becoming a problem.

Where I've seen Lacebug I've seriously sprayed the affected tree (and all its neighbours), and come back and checked it a few days later. So far I am not finding the same tree affected twice, and in fact am finding evidence of old Lacebug damage, but the criminals are gone.

I did have one tree with two generations of Lacebug. I got nervous about this new method and just went old-school on that tree and sprayed the insects with pesticide.

It wasn't planned but I read that the olive leaf gets most of the benefit of the foliar spraying through the underside of the leaf. Which is great, because that's where the Lacebug live., so my focus is to spray up and under the tree rather than raining from above. Its also quite possible the high pressure pump I am using has enough oomph to blast the Lacebug off the leaves.

We have four paddocks of trees and I have one to go.

Two years ago we severely pruned some trees that were damaged. Initially they looked terrible but they have recovered well. Below are two images, the trees after they had been defoliated by Lacebug, and two plus years later the almost-the-same shot of vibrant, flowering trees.

Trees decimated by Lacebug, foliage gone and some branches dead or dying.

November 2026, the same trees have now recovered and are flowering for the first time. Flowering heavily!