A whole year has past and here we are again Spring 2010

The news from our grove for the harvest of 2010 is not the best.
4 days prior to harvest 14th June 10, Jack Frost came to visit unannounced 3 mornings in a row. So our fruit froze and we lost almost our entire crop we salvaged just 888 kilos which gave us 200 litres of a good oil.
Because we believe in only producing the very best quality olive oil from our grove we then had to drop approx 10 tonnes of fruit to the ground to ensure good flowering and fruit set for 2011.
We have sent our oil to Italy, Canberra and Perth again for judging, we await the results.
Once again this August we hosted a pruning seminar here with Chris Butler from Olive Matters, and this year we followed up with a Sensory Evaluation seminar,run by Chris, which was enjoyed by a small but enthusiastic group, some from as far away as North of Gingin and Bunbury. We enjoyed a wonderful Italian lunch, Menu: Pinzimonio (crudites)
La Fettunta ( Bruschetta Alla Toscana, Pasta al'olio e aglio (Oil and Garlic Pasta) and to finished off with an Olive oil and Fig cake, all accompanied by a excellent Mount Barker Riesling.
The day started with a power point presentation, guided tasting and after lunch a formal blind tasting of local, National and Italian olive oils. This bought about some very interesting comments and conversation.

We are now busy pruning all of our 1700 trees and mulching up the prunings and spreading it around each of our trees as this winter we have received almost no rain, our dams do not have enough water to irrigate the grove this year. We are hoping for good Spring rains and more in March and May to get our trees through untill harvest June 2011.