We all love spring, the time when the sun begins to give more abundant warmth and nature wakes up, the plants begin to release juices and all around us new life begins to sprout from the earth and from the bare branches. It is the same in our olive groves in the vicinity of Novigrad. Although it does not lose its leaves in the winter, in the spring, like any other fruit tree, the olive tree wakes up and revives, which means that it is our turn to help it in everything it needs so that in fall it will again give us fruits rich in precious oil.
Climatic phenomena caused by global warming in recent years have completely shattered the routine thinking about the growing season of olives. Every year is different, each one brings its own phenomena related to temperatures, humidity, winds and other circumstances in which our olive trees will grow and produce their fruits in the coming months. That is why we have to closely monitor what is happening and perform the necessary work in the olive grove on time, because good oil is not produced only with harvesting and processing, but with year-round care of each individual tree and the olive grove as a biological unit.
We prepared the olive grove for wintering immediately after last year’s harvest, by ploughing the soil between the rows of trees. If the weather had not been so rainy, we would have fertilized the soil in the olive grove immediately after ploughing, but we left the fertilization with organic fertilizers for the more suitable dry weather in February. We sowed grass in every other row and at the end of February and beginning of March we also did the pruning.
Until the beginning of the growing season in May, the grass that has grown in the meantime should be mulched during April to form humus under the trees and thus everything will be ready for the final phase of the spring awakening of our olives: their budding and flowering, which is followed by the formation of fruit and its gradual saturation with oil.
The last year was very good in our olive groves because the dry weather greatly reduced the occurrence of pests and diseases of the olives. Drought is a very good thing for olives if it rains at the right time and that’s exactly what happened last season. Let’s keep in mind that the olive tree is rightly considered the tree of life, because it will survive all kinds of extreme climatic conditions, although precisely because of the climate, its fruit will not be the same every year.
Precisely because every year is different, through the past decades of the olive growing tradition of the Červar family, we have developed a primordial coexistence with our olives and monitoring natural changes is our daily routine, especially at this time of the year when the olive groves and the surrounding lands are covered in fifty shades of green. On this year’s journey towards top-quality Červar oils, nature has just taken the first step.