We Needed Ladders

The yield on the oil is 17 kilos a quintal. YES - 17 kgs.

And the oil is delicious. Not peppery and pretend-valued for it when actually peppery means picked too early: it is smooth, green as the eyes of a goddess, and just perfectly viscous.

They've been picking for a week - no, I found the strength of mind to declare olive-picking outside my remit - I cooked for the hungry-as-hunters. A strong Sydney-sider showing has made the finishing line next Tuesday. The second tranche (or whatever is the correct term) goes to the mill tomorrow, then one more on Wednesday morning.

The Foreman is beside himself; this is the result of years of faith and work. The olive groves were collapsed, ruined, abandoned, frozen by winter cold and burned by summer droughts. Overgrown by scrub oak, infested with brambles. But we, and it was me too in the early years, have coppiced and chopped and cleared and ploughed and organically fertilised and pruned and chatted to the trees until they have at last stopped sulking and dying.

People ask us for the oil. Have we enough yet to sell? Always noted for its quality it is coming back into repute, not least because in all the years of dosing the countryside with every chemical known to man (I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the local peasantry had used Agent Orange, so great is their hatred of their enemies in the olive cultivation field) our olive trees stood untouched or molested by man. There is a lot of fear of what was sprayed and poured onto the fields in the bad old days; the empty waters of the Arno are only now beginning to have wading birds, fish, skimming insects and even swimmers (hardy Germans and close to the source, admittedly). We used once to cross a field of violets to swim in the Arno, where the river bed had been paved with pietra serena and eels lived near the bridge. I wouldn't get in now, probably be cut off at the knees still, but it is getting better, although the wading birds are only risking one leg, I notice.

It's so exciting, all that work and ad un tratto as they say round here, it yields.

It yields, to be absolutely accurate, 16.977 kgs a quintal.