Where did the summer go?

Very sorry, can’t believe that it’s been so long since we last updated the diary! Instead of one single entry trying to cover everything we will add little bits over the next few days.

The summer drew to an end with several visits by friends and family, so several weeks went by with a very pleasant social calendar. Then we had a couple of weeks working on the house and garden followed by our olive picking. During that time nothing really happened that we felt was worth writing about here in the diary. We could fill it each day with a very mundane commentary about each bit of work we do or each visit to Kalamata, but we’re not sure who would become bored first!

Anyway, lets give you a report on our olive picking. There are still several trees that are suffering very badly from damage inflicted during build work. Out of the 52 trees we originally had we were left with 39 after the house was built. However, one has now been reduced to a 3inch high stump, one that looked very poor has died and another 4 had very few olives, because of damage. That means we had 32 trees that cropped this year. From these we had 18 sacks of olives, picked in three batches, which gave us 141 litres of oil! After the olive press had taken their percentage to pay for the pressing and a few litres we shared with some friends we now have 115 litres of oil. More than plenty for us this year, but after we give away a little during the year and retain some in case next years harvest is poor, it’s probably about right for us.

The weather has now turned wet this week and the evenings are getting cooler. On a good day it’s still pleasant to work in the garden in a t-shirt and if there’s only a little wind then it does feel quite warm.