After a year with no olives (2022) and an olive tree killing disease called Xylella fastidiosa (xylella) swiftly approaching, we appreciated this year’s harvest more than normal. We harvested for about a month beginning in late October and were fortunate to be joined by seasoned harvester Django, Caleb’s son who lives in Paris, and other friends from Seattle and Chicago.  We no longer take for granted that our trees will continue to be healthy and produce olives, and often wondered aloud, soberly, if this would be one of our last harvests for awhile.

Since our last harvest in 2021, we now have the signs of xylella in many of our trees. Xylella was first detected in Puglia in 2013 and now one-third of Puglia’s 60 million trees have become infected or died. Having observed how quickly it has moved in the provinces south of us, we know it moves fast. There is still no known cure for this disease and the olive oil economy in Puglia has been ravaged by it. They have discovered that certain varieties of olives are resistant, and to date, the only hope is to graft these varieties to the existing trunks, which we are doing aggressively. The act is more drastic than simply pruning, and requires removing most of the existing organic growth on the trees, which transforms their shape, and charm, dramatically. It also takes a lot of courage to make that first cut of a tree that has stood for centuries.

Since Caleb first started experimenting with this art in 2020 we have grafted about 25 of our existing trees and 50 or so of the wild olive trees that sprout up every year. This year, we collected a bucket of olives from the first tree grafted in 2020, a small harvest that gave us some hope. It will likely to take years before we can harvest the trees we are grafting, each newly grafted tree being out of the game for at least five years, and this fact is also sobering. Our harvests will be smaller every year. But as there is no other known cure, it is the only hope to save the existing tree.

Grafting Resistant Varieties to combat Xylella

Caleb grafting a leccino (one of the varieties resistant to xylella) scion, to one of our existing trees in April 2023

The before-and-after of a tree grafted with the resistant variety

The Harvest

But back to this year’s harvest. Because despite the inevitable advancing of xylella, this year, our trees still produced healthy olives that were milled into delicious, organic, extra-virgin olive oil and we are grateful to all the friends and family who came to help us produce it.