Feed the Tree....
This week I’v had a ‘Masterclass’ in olive pruning with the great olive supremo, Danielle, the go-to-guru when you need anything tree related in or around Cortona. He’s quite a guy to work with and has kept me entertained all week with the ‘banter di l’olive’. Lesson 1: You can’t prune in the rain, that’s the first thing I learnt and my god we have had the rain. So we waited for a sunny day and got cracking with the ‘potatura dell ‘olive’...pruning of the olive tree. We have 250 trees in the Olivetti on grass terraces for harvesting olives in November in Tuscany to make the oil. Now in Spring, the trees need to be pruned and completed this needs to be completed by May 1st. My mentor told me to get into the middle of the tree and start with the ‘succhioni’s’...the suckers, as the middle needs to be clear and airy and these little fellas suck up all the goodness needed by the tree. The ‘polloni’ need to be removed too, a separate name for the sucker growth on the tr...