olive oil

    Unfinished stuff is the stuff of nightmares. I used to be much more comfortable with unfinished stuff, but now that school is long over and I'm no longer trying to understand biochemistry, unfinished projects can really bug me. Like this house.

    I have a pretty good idea of what we need to do to heat this house. I've modeled its heat loss on the computer at various proposed outdoor temperatures and I know how much heat we need. I also know where we can get this heat for the least expense and how to store and distribute it. When I hear our neighbors, builders, and friends discuss the subject I know now not to get involved. They just don't get it and I can't convince anyone I know what I'm talking about. I can only show them. And to show them, I need to get my underfloor heating system installed and get it fed by my solar panels and woodstove. I've been trying to do this for the past three winters, and in my rush, I have overlooked the actual challenge of making the ground floor air, water, and warmth tight as well as improving the strength of the structure and its foundations. It's a huge project.

    In November we got to the point where we could begin the final coat of plaster in the laundry room. The laundry room has been one of the big hurdles. It's deeply excavated below the existing foundations and its walls were never very good. It's also the site of the hot water tank where our precious heat will be stored as well as the entry point for electrical and water supplies. It's the room that must come first. It's taken a long time to work out all the problems and once the final coat of plaster began to go up, I found it almost impossible to stop working. I'd work right into the night. It's been my Moby Dick.

    But in November, everything must stop when the olives begin to ripen, even the final plaster.  It's a crop. It's farming. It depends on the weather and it's tough to predict. Further, harvesting is dangerous and is best done in good weather. Climbing trees in the rain doesn't make sense and wet olives rot before they can be pressed. The whole thing demands a lot of attention and all of one's time. Last year we housed a small army of workaway volunteers and it rained. Rained and rained. I put them to work as best I could throwing mortar at holes in the cantina walls, but the whole month was not our best. Alex had to house and feed a ton of people who had to work in not-so-nice conditions. We got our oil, and it was sensational as usual; but too costly. This year we didn't bother bringing in a single volunteer besides Giles. I was still a sort of one-armed man, scared of being hurt again, and sore from plastering. Giles didn't like climbing trees much and Alex... well, she was just fine, but she's running a household with two children in school, and... well, there's never enough of her to go around. But the weather held and we turned our attention to picking. And the weather got better and better and we picked and picked, and borrowed more and more baskets, and sawed off great limbs in an effort to catch up with forgotten pruning. Thomasina and Isolde got enthusiastic and the five of us spent 10 days or so in the most lovely weather, enjoying the outdoors which we might have missed if we didn't have to harvest the crop. The region was having a poor harvest with some yields down 50%. Our trees didn't look too promising either, but we kept on moving, picking and picking. We even picked Dan and Miranda's trees, and in the end we filled every basket we could borrow. We took two full van loads (mini-van, anyway) to the mill and set a record for quantity. I'm looking at the mill receipt right now and it shows 745 kilograms delivered yielding 109 litres of olive oil.

    One the most delightful things on our calendar is the moment of dipping a garlicky, salty piece of hot toast into freshly pressed olive oil and tasting that oddly pugent, full, outdoorsy flavor of our own oil. It's a taste that doesn't last. As the oil ages, it mellows and becomes less a flavor of its own and more a component to food. We first experienced this with Tom and Ruth after joining a local harvest. A blind tasting was put before us and we all choose the wrong oil with our naive palates. Now we are wiser and look for the elusive flavor elements.

   Olive oil is available in every food store, but the free-run, fresh oil is a completely different thing. Now I'm beginning to wonder if I can air-freight this to America or England in small quantities immediately after the harvest to offer the experience to those who might be interested... hmmm.