Olive Growers Unite - A Time to Community Crush

Scene of this year's abundant olive harvest bounty above was snapped by the lens of the lovely Teela, West Petaluma olive grower, grape farmer extraordinaire, co-purveyor with hubby Michael of our favorite local Pinot, Ridgeway Two Pisces.

Teela is a woman with a mission this December. An educational mission to inform Petalumans of the practicalities of taking care of their increasingly popular fruit-bearing olive trees.

Don't want olives falling in your yard? Not sure what to do with them? Not aware that you could be unknowingly attracting the pesky and destructive olive fruit fly to your yard and consequently causing an infestation to neighboring olive orchards?

Here are some of Teela's helpful instructions to help combat an over abundance of under utilized olives:

If you planted them in the first place, or inherited them but don't want to deal with your fruit bearing olive trees dropping fruit in your yard, eliminate the potential for fruit each Spring by spraying olive blossoms with a powerful water spray. Make sure to purchase non-fruit bearing olive trees in the future.

Don't know what to do with the olives you have? Pick the fruit early in future, while it is still small and before the pesky olive fly arrives on the scene late summer.

Advertise fruit on Craig's List; it may appeal to plenty of folk for curing and adding to their own olive oil crop.

Call or email McEvoy Ranch here in West Petaluma, the region's olive growing experts at 707 778 2307 for help and advice. Check out the UC extension website for useful tidbits of olive info.

Practice proper olive tree hygiene! If you leave olives on your tree to rot or to fall on to the ground, you are likely to be attracting an infestation of olive fruit fly which will undoubtedly damage or destroy your olives, rendering them useless and spread to other trees in the area. Left untreated, the olove fruit fly could feasibly infest an entire geographical area as large as Sonoma County.

Organic spray (GF 120) can be safely applied to your olive trees - call Sebastopol agricultural supplier UAP to purchase GF 120 at 707 823 6431, or trap the olive fruit fly with traps purchaed from Brett Roble at ISCA (email brett.roble@iscatech.com).

Even if you don't want the fruit, you should always remove all of the olives from your trees and either give them away or dispose of them in your green compost bin. Back yard composting is not a good idea as you could very well be providing an even larger breeding ground for the fly.

Thinking of actually utilizing all that fruit? There are many recipes available on-line as to how to cure olives during the November/December harvest season. Try one! It takes around 60 -80 pounds of olives to make your own gallon of oil. If you have a decent harvest haul, hop on over to McEvoy Ranch for one of their excellent community milling days (there is one this Sunday - 9am to 10am only prior to open house).

If you spot a tree laden with olives in West Petaluma this weekend, chances are you'll catch the industrious Mrs Ridgeway half way up a ladder with a bin on her arm. Teela's determined to leave every tree completely stripped of this fantastic fruit in her campaign to make our neighbors aware of their olive tree responsibilities. Go Teela! And thanks for all of the expert advice.