Classic Gardening Magazine
Gardening as it ought to be
Olive-pruning time
It's time to prune the olive trees in Italy. Adriano, my brother-in-law, has a couple of dozen around his house in the village of Malcesine on the shore of Lake Garda in northern Italy, and he kindly offered to initiate me.
He knows I have fruit trees back in London, so he let me loose with his super-sharp machete, and allowed me to clamber up the precarious ladders - one metal pole with steel struts poked through it - that the old boys scamper up and down like monkeys.
Olive pruning is not as easy as it looks, but the principle is straightforward enough. What you have to do is tackle the apial dominance - the propensity of the olive to reach for the sky and use all it's energy in growth rather than in producing olives.
So some hefty main boughs have to be taken out to give the top of the tree a crestfallen appearance like a dog that's just been shown it's place. Then you have to tackle the myriad branches that are growing skyward along every horizontal branch.
After that it's a question of thinning vigorously to ensure the forest of downward-growing branchlets have room to breathe.
Finally, you have to drink a very large quantity of local red wine - nothing fancy, the stuff in cardboard cartons from the local supermarket goes down a treat. That bit's easy.
I can't say I performed like a superstar, but I enjoyed my first lesson. Perhaps Adriano can help with my mulberry harvest come August. I'm not sure he quite believes that you can make wine from anything other than grapes.
The freshest seasonal antipasto around right now - at least on Lake Garda's Olive Coast - is asparagus and eggs with pecorino or Parmasan cheese.
Most people around here have a patch of asparagus in the garden, and a couple of hens.
The asparagus is boiled, the eggs can either be poached, soft boiled or fried, and the cheese is sprinkled over them. Here's the recipe. Very appetising after an afternoon in the olive grove.
In case you forget it is time to enjoy this wonderful spring dish, the grocers in Malcesine
(the lakeside village pictured left where I spent last weekend) put
their asparagus and eggs on display alongside each other as a sort of
hint hint.
They also do that at the Consorzio Olivicoltori Malcesine which is the place in the village where olives were once turned into oil but that is now a bit of a tourist souvenir spot. But when you are a tourist, it can be very interesting.
We wandered past after dinner and saw there was a TV in the window showing a video of the olive harvest.
We were hooked. What a movie.
There were the old boys shaking the olives off the trees onto sheets laid beneath, gathering them into great plastic crates that were then taken by truck, fork-lift or Ape (a sort of three-wheeled scooter with a flat-bed on the back - not a large monkey) to the new olive press, out of town.
There was no one under - at a guess - 80 involved in all this. And only one was female. She was allowed to get the lunch organised. It consisted of salami, cheese, bread and red wine. Something to look forward to, come October. I can only hope Adriano and Angelo, my prune-tutors, will let me back to see the results of my labours with the secateurs. Just to remind them how industrious I was, here's me, hefting a jolly big bit of olive tree that was surplus to requirements.
It's time to prune the olive trees in Italy. Adriano, my brother-in-law, has a couple of dozen around his house in the village of Malcesine on the shore of Lake Garda in northern Italy, and he kindly offered to initiate me.
He knows I have fruit trees back in London, so he let me loose with his super-sharp machete, and allowed me to clamber up the precarious ladders - one metal pole with steel struts poked through it - that the old boys scamper up and down like monkeys.
Olive pruning is not as easy as it looks, but the principle is straightforward enough. What you have to do is tackle the apial dominance - the propensity of the olive to reach for the sky and use all it's energy in growth rather than in producing olives.
So some hefty main boughs have to be taken out to give the top of the tree a crestfallen appearance like a dog that's just been shown it's place. Then you have to tackle the myriad branches that are growing skyward along every horizontal branch.
After that it's a question of thinning vigorously to ensure the forest of downward-growing branchlets have room to breathe.
Finally, you have to drink a very large quantity of local red wine - nothing fancy, the stuff in cardboard cartons from the local supermarket goes down a treat. That bit's easy.
I can't say I performed like a superstar, but I enjoyed my first lesson. Perhaps Adriano can help with my mulberry harvest come August. I'm not sure he quite believes that you can make wine from anything other than grapes.
The freshest seasonal antipasto around right now - at least on Lake Garda's Olive Coast - is asparagus and eggs with pecorino or Parmasan cheese.
Most people around here have a patch of asparagus in the garden, and a couple of hens.
The asparagus is boiled, the eggs can either be poached, soft boiled or fried, and the cheese is sprinkled over them. Here's the recipe. Very appetising after an afternoon in the olive grove.
In case you forget it is time to enjoy this wonderful spring dish, the grocers in Malcesine
(the lakeside village pictured left where I spent last weekend) put
their asparagus and eggs on display alongside each other as a sort of
hint hint.They also do that at the Consorzio Olivicoltori Malcesine which is the place in the village where olives were once turned into oil but that is now a bit of a tourist souvenir spot. But when you are a tourist, it can be very interesting.
We wandered past after dinner and saw there was a TV in the window showing a video of the olive harvest.
We were hooked. What a movie.
There were the old boys shaking the olives off the trees onto sheets laid beneath, gathering them into great plastic crates that were then taken by truck, fork-lift or Ape (a sort of three-wheeled scooter with a flat-bed on the back - not a large monkey) to the new olive press, out of town.
There was no one under - at a guess - 80 involved in all this. And only one was female. She was allowed to get the lunch organised. It consisted of salami, cheese, bread and red wine. Something to look forward to, come October. I can only hope Adriano and Angelo, my prune-tutors, will let me back to see the results of my labours with the secateurs. Just to remind them how industrious I was, here's me, hefting a jolly big bit of olive tree that was surplus to requirements.
