Olive Farm

by Carol Drinkwater

  “We ought to net the trees before we lose the crop,” he suggests.

  I try to reach René, but he is not home. His wife promises to “faire le commission,” which means that she will tell him we called. He does not ring back, not today or the next. We make a tour of the sodden springy earth around the roots of the trees again and agree that the ratio of fruit on the ground to fruit on the branches is shifting in balance. Whether the rain started the downward flow, the olives have been attacked by a fly or another of the nine maladies René mentioned that we know nothing about, or they have simply ripened too early, our inexperience cannot guide us, but we decide that the grounds must be netted.

  I am confident we can manage this part of the operation on our own and suggest to Michel that the Coopérative Agricole might be the very place to guide us with our needs. He agrees and waves me off in the Renault, which is becoming a greater health hazard every day, to purchase netting while he reads through my latest pages of work. Naturally, the purchase is not as straightforward as I had hoped.

  The chief gardener at the cooperative, a ruddy-cheeked, bespectacled young man, is sent out to deal with me, the foreigner attempting to go native. His patience for such an animal clearly ran out seasons ago.

  “Oui?”

  “I would like to buy netting, please, for our olive trees.”

  “Which color?”

  Color!

  Price, quality, even dimensions, I was vaguely prepared for, but not color. The French bourgeois obsession for matching and designing every item of house and gardenware cannot, surely, have stretched to the color of olive grove nets, can it?

  “Does it matter?” I ask sheepishly, certain that my response is only going to confirm his already formed opinion that I am a city-bred ninny wasting his precious time. He sighs theatrically and stomps off. I hesitantly stay where I am until he spins around and orders me to follow him, which, obediently, I do. We arrive in front of a massive roll of bright red netting spooled onto an iron bar operated by a rusting handle which looks as though it has been plucked from a nineteenth-century laundry wringer.

  “Rouge,” he says.

  I could not disagree.

  “Is this the one you want?”

  “Oui, peut-être.” I am doing my best.

  “Deux francs vingt,” he tells me, as though, for someone as ignorant as myself, cost would be the deciding factor. I am taken aback by the price, which strikes me as extremely reasonable at approximately twenty-two pence.

  “A meter?” I feel I should confirm the good news.

  “Par six, le longeur.”

  By six in length. We are getting somewhere. Sounds good, I tell him. He looks disappointed and vaguely impatient with me and proceeds to tug at the red netting with his fingers until a small strip of it begins to split.

  “Eh, voilà!”

  I assume he has made this little test to prove to me that the net is not too difficult to cut, but no.

  “You see, if you had decided upon the green…”

  “Ah, the green?”

  “Two francs ninety.”

  Tucked away at the back of an enormous hangar area, protected by corrugated roofing, is the green. Similarly rolled, marginally longer, but otherwise identical to my eye. He strides toward it, unfurls a few feet and begins tugging. Nothing happens.

  “Costaud,” I confirm with the nod of a sage who knows what she is talking about. It is tougher, more resilient. It won’t rip when, by mistake, someone—me—treads all over it. I understand, and he is pleased with me. At least I think he is, because he grunts and begins to unroll a length of many meters in readiness for the cut.

  “How many meters would you like?”

  I smile, attempting charm. “Well, I’m not exactly sure.”

  The netting is dropped to the ground. A fellow gardener from somewhere far off calls, “Frédéric!”

  “J’arrive!”

  I feel my time is running out. I begin to talk fast. “We have sixty-four trees, so that would be…”

  “What are the size, the reach of the branches? What age are the trees? Are they facing south? Have you measured the circumference of the root areas? What variety?”

  To each question, I shake my head.

  Poor Frédéric is growing exasperated, and I am mortified, knowing that I have played my part of the amateur olive farmer only too convincingly.

  “I tell you what,” he suggests with a warmth I had not counted on at this stage. “Buy a roll! Pourquoi pas? It is considerably cheaper, and that way you can measure the lengths at home and cut the nets accordingly.”

  It sounds like an excellent idea and lets us both off the hook. I agree wholeheartedly. He points me to the caisse situated inside in the shop and asks which car is mine. I signal the wreck parked near the gate and hurry off to pay. While in the shop, I pick up the odd extra purchases—oil for the chainsaw, blocks of olive oil soap as hefty as building bricks, thirty kilos of dog biscuits—and pull out my check book. The girl rings up the items and announces a figure which is a little short of five thousand francs.

  “Five thou… ?”

  It is then that I learn that I have just purchased a thousand meters of green netting. I dare not change my mind, so I smile wanly and write out the check, which will just about empty my account.

  Outside, I find Frédéric and his colleague closing up the car, which looks as though it has sprouted wings. Not surprisingly, the roll could not be squeezed into the trunk; nor would it fit in the car’s interior, so it has been wedged between the front passenger seat and the rear seat directly behind my driving place. In each case, it is protuding from the open windows a full eighteen inches or more.

  “Isn’t this a little dangerous?” I mutter. Frédéric is not interested; he is now serving someone else. I start up the engine, blue smoke billows forth and off I roar, trying not to take the garden center gates with me.

  By the time I haul up the drive, I am exhausted and my nervous system has been shot to pieces. Half of Provence has hooted or yelled at me, and while I was being rudely overtaken on a roundabout by a very impatient gentleman, my precious netting actually dislodged his passenger-side driving mirror and he was about ready to run me into the gutter. Still, I am home more or less in one piece, and more importantly, we have our filets. Michel is laughing loudly, No Name and her three remaining puppies are scrambling around my ankles, barking and mewling enthusiastically—they can smell biscuits—but nothing we do, no matter how we shove or pull or tug, will shift the thousand-meter roll of netting.

  Exhausted, we finally manage to contact René. When he arrives and sees the netting, he stops and stares at it in puzzled amazement. “But why didn’t you buy the white?” he demands.

  HOW DIFFICULT CAN it be to lay a length of netting around the foot of a tree? Is it feasible that this work could take three men and myself as many days? There is a skill to it that I would not have fathomed. First, the brush-cutting machines need to clear a circle of approximately six meters in every direction around the foot of each tree. This is to make sure the net doesn’t get tangled in growing herbage and to facilitate the collection of the fallen olives later. After Michel and Quashia have completed this part of the process, the first day is almost over, and the evening air has an oniony scent to it. I love it; freshly mown grass never had quite that same piquancy. I assume it is the mixture of those extra ingredients: felled wild garlic, dandelion for mesclun, wild and unidentified Provençal herbs.

  When the auspicious moment arrives for the laying of the first net, René explains that the ground needs to be covered to the farthest reach of every branch, wasting no meterage, cutting the netting as infrequently as possible and marking out the lengths immediately, by numbering both tree and net, so that next year the whole process is not a complete muddle while we casse our têtes trying to work out which length goes where. And while all this is going on, how best to keep the overexcited puppies from sitting on the netting or your feet every time you want to
unroll a length or readjust the positioning of it? How much netting can three puppies chew and destroy while your back is turned for five minutes? The men allocate me the task of puppy patrol.

  René’s white netting is harder and less flexible but not necessarily more durable. And it doesn’t blend into the colors of nature so naturally. I prefer the green, but I keep that opinion very close to my chest—that is, until the sun shines through the branches, which hang low like full skirts, and the nets and the silvery underside of the leaves begin to glint, and the entire effect resembles a cascading platinum sea. Green or white, nature creates magnificence.

  Toward dusk on the third day, when the nets are in place, carefully symmetrical so that not one poor migrant olive can escape, we lay boulders and sticks at strategic points to hinder movement and to create a basin effect, a cradle, so that with any wind or heavy rain, the fruit will not roll away. I place a large stone at the border of a net and rise, worn out in a positive, healthy way. The men are at work one terrace beneath me, unrolling the last of the meters, shouting to one another, debating. René, Quashia and Michel and the netting, bathed in the golden light of evening: that late-autumn sunlight, honeyed and still, which is particular to this climate. The sight of the men on the land and meters of netting calls to mind preparations for a rural wedding feast, with veils and dresses and local produce. A feast, yes, for at the end of all this, the ritual of the harvesting and pressing, there will be a grand fête, a street party held in the villages, a Mediterranean thanksgiving to l’arbre roi de Provence or l’arbre immortel.

  The work we are doing here is keeping faith with the past. It has been acted out for thousands of years, the labors of the land. The olive is un arbre noble, a noble tree. According to biblical legend, it survived the great deluge of Noah and his ark; the dove brought its branch as a sign of peace and that the rains had finally subsided. There is no other artisan who works with tools which are several hundred years old. Indeed, in the eyes of the oléiculteur, the older the better.

  There is dignity and humility in this work, in the yielding to it, the power and force and, on occasion, the cruelty of nature as well as its phenomenal generosity. Its fruits should not be wasted. I read somewhere this morning, in one of the many French books on horticulture pratique that litter the wooden table in my still-undecorated atelier, yet another version of those bygone beginnings of olive farming: the cultivation of olive groves and the pressing of the fruit began in Iran long before it was thought of in Greece. Old Testament territory. The Iranians took the olive to Greece. But it was the inhabitants of Phoenicia, an ancient territory which consisted of a narrow strip of coastal land bordering Syria, to the northwest of Palestine, who brought the trees to France some eight hundred years before Christ, approximately three hundred years before the Greeks arrived here. Or was it the Greeks those three centuries later, as most contend? The fact is that the history of the olive is so buried in the distant past that no one seems certain of its precise beginnings. What is certain is that we are here today, Arab and European, embarking on a method of farming—revered in both the Koran and the Bible—a gathering and pressing, almost as old as life itself.

  CHAPTER TEN

  PRESSING THE OLIVE

  Finally, at long last, the moment has arrived. We are about to begin our very first harvest: la cueillette des olives. It is a critical period because the fruit has to be gathered at precisely the right moment and in the correct manner. The olives do not produce top-quality oil if picked too green. On the other hand, if the fruit is left on the trees too long and it overripens or grows wrinkled, then the drupes begin to oxidize, which gives a bitter, unpleasant taste to the oil.

  This year, our first as olive farmers, we have a bumper crop. We will lose some of the fruit if it is not gathered and delivered to the moulin within forty-eight hours. René says we will need help, particularly in light of our lack of experience. We accept his counsel, and the following morning—the first occasion since we met him that he turns up on the day he said he would—he brings with him a motley collection of harvesters. Each of the five gatherers, one woman and four men, is presented to us, and each steps forward to give us his or her name and profession. They treat us deferentially, with what we suppose is the respect normally shown to proprietors, oléiculteurs, of a grand domaine. This puzzling behavior makes us both a little awkward. We have not come across this class barrier here before. We would prefer a rather less formal relationship, and I offer them bottles of water, for the day is warm and I want to lighten the mood.

  “Nous avons, nous avons tous,” they assure us politely and retreat. They set about unloading their cars, parked on a flat grassy bank which skirts the base of the hill and the lowest of the terraces. It is a beautiful morning. The birds are chirping. There is heat in this late-November day. We leave them to their work and head off to begin our share of the picking at the top end of the land, promising to return later to see how their share of the récolte is progressing. I suspect René has divided us into two groups so that should we, with our city fingers and clumsy unskilled ways, damage the fruit—all too easily done—our basket loads need not be mixed in with those collected by the professionals and won’t destroy the acid balance at the pressing.

  What excites me is the thought of that first taste. There are over fifty different varieties of olives, and I have bought and tasted and cooked with an assortment of oils. Some were virgin, others were extra-virgin, while a few bottles were of a lesser quality or mixed varieties of olives. We will soon be trying a single-variety oil cold-pressed exclusively from our cailletier olives. Perhaps at some point in my life I have used oil pressed from this southern French variety, these rocky coastal hills, without being aware of it. Even if that were the case, they were not from here, not from this very hill. A modest geographical nuance, but it makes a world of difference to us. Part of the thrill lies in the expectation. Does this farm, our humble terraces, produce fruit that can be classed as first-class oil? We can only wait and see. Until then, there is hard work to be done.

  The gathering is backbreaking. And time-consuming. And there is no way around it. René does not hold with wooden rakes. No, every olive is gathered from the trees by hand, stretching from ladders or climbing up in the branches and reaching out to pick each olive individually, for they do not grow in bunches.

  “But I read that the wooden rakes are good. They’re used on many of the well-known estates,” I protest.

  He shakes his head adamantly. “No. Whatever anyone says, the rakes can cause damage. Two or three olives growing close to one another, almost a cluster, the rake is bound to bruise at least one. No, we will climb the trees. You, Carol, can take a ladder.”

  So here I am, battling with branches flicking me in the face, wobbling and gripping for dear life. On top of which, when I have managed to clutch hold of an olive or two, I must take care not to squeeze it too hard or hold it too long in my sticky palms and overheat it. And the nets, both white and green, that encircle the base of the trees have to be considered for fear they may split. Worse, if the foot of the ladder gets caught up in the netting, I and the ladder will topple over, spilling two hours’ work on to the ground. It is about now that I am beginning to wish we had bought a vineyard. At least cultivation and harvest are at ground level.

  OUR FIRST VISIT TO the moulin. Heading off into the hills with René once more, we are planning to visit two mills, about twenty minutes apart. René wants us to choose where our fruit is to be pressed, particularly given my preference for all matters organic. Our first stop is at the mill he recommended. He brings the harvests from his other farms here, and like so many of these traditional land matters, it is family-run. Altogether, on his four farms, including ours, he is husbanding seven hundred and twenty trees, so, not surprisingly, he is a familiar and well-loved face at the mill. When we arrive, he takes us first to the shop that the family runs above the mill. Set on a cobbled hill, this is the tourist arm of their trade.

 
; Once inside, everybody kisses and embraces and we are introduced as the patrons of the villa-farm in the hills overlooking the coast. During a brief tour of the merchandise—Provençal napkins, various jams and soaps and objects such as pepper and salt shakers carved out of olive wood—we observe the steady flow of men with children, or lone adolescents, bringing their farms’ early season pickings. Their olives are delivered in large woven panniers, about the size of a modest laundry basket, resembling those which in bygone days were strapped to the sides of donkeys or packhorses. Other loads are delivered in plastic crates, and a few arrive in bulging sacks that look like outmoded coal bags—though these are discouraged now because they do not meet the latest European Union standards of hygiene. The fruit is placed on a whacking, great metal scale, where it is weighed and then stacked on the floor in a line alongside a chute which will shunt the gathered drupes down to the level of the mill.

  While all this weighing and stacking is taking place, a cashier is filling in lilac tickets and handing them out. The tickets provide each farmer or gatherer of the fruit with a receipt which states the precise quantity of olives delivered. Later, after the pression, it will also confirm the quantity of oil pressed from those olives.

  How the oil is measured is fascinating but somewhat difficult to grasp—convoluted, I’d say—and dates back to the days when farmers arrived with their olives in measures known as une motte. Literally translated, a motte is a mound. One measure, une mesure, is equal to twelve and a half kilos of olives, the cashier—one of only two staff at the mill who is not a member of the family—explains to us.

  “Why twelve and a half kilos?” I ask ingenuously. It seems a curious figure for calculation. René then jumps in to explain that the containers used in the olden days carried precisely twelve and a half kilos. (I refrain from asking why.) Across the lip was a measuring stick. When the loaded olives were even with the measuring stick, it contained twelve and a half kilos. Twenty of these containers equal une motte.