Lady orchids

Lady orchids

There’s a particular spot  in the olive grove which always has loads of these robust orchids.

When I went to take my photograph, I had to be very careful to choose a moment when the dogs were distracted elsewhere, otherwise they would charge in to join me and break all the flower spikes.

The lady orchid is supposedly so named because the individual flowers look like a lady in regency dress and bonnet.

There’s another orchid called the ‘naked man’ orchid for reasons that are obvious when you look at it. Its scientific name is ‘orchis italica’, and sometimes it’s called the ‘Italian man’ orchid!

The orchard in spring

The photo shows the corner of the orchard  furthest away from the house and the drive, where there are two apple trees next door to each other.

The weather has been so wet of late that I doubt if much of the apple blossom has been pollinated.

The rain has been excellent for the grass, though.

The grass in the orchard is quite different to the grass in the olive grove beyond it, even though we never sowed any grass seed after planting the fruit trees but just let it repopulate by itself. It’s much softer, lusher and fast-growing.

It’s perfect if you want to flop down in it for a picnic or a snooze at this time of year, but (along with its weeds) it rapidly gets to head height if you don’t strim it.

I’ll be having the delightful job of strimming it quite soon. In fact the sooner the better, because if everything gets too high, it’s twice the labour.

Cutting wood

I met our neighbour in the Post Office today. He asked me if I’d done my pruning yet and I realised with a jolt that it’s no longer February, the ‘pruning’ month.

Then he told me that later today he would be cutting down dead trees for the man who bought the land adjoining our olive grove.

Sure enough, just after lunch, there was the sound of a tractor and all 3 dogs raced down the slope to meet them.

The new neighbour has a 4 month-old Maremmano which Kepler made immediate friends with. She isn’t ready and he isn’t able, but both of them are willing.

Dead cherry

The tree being cut into logs is a cherry. When I checked this, our neighbour was quick to point out that the tree was just beyond our property line, which amused me as I wouldn’t have minded if it had been our tree.

I started pruning in the orchard after that. I did most work on a Reinette du Canada apple and a Santa Rosa plum.

Olive oil, liquid gold

After the apparently poor olive harvest, our neighbour mentioned bringing some oil as per our agreement but never did. Last night I phoned and asked about it.

Our share of the yield from our grove

He replied that the yield barely covered the expense of picking, that there’d been so many ‘quintali’ of olives yielding so many kilos of oil (he lost me here), that he’d spent a fortune on diesel coming and going, that he wouldn’t have enough oil to last the year, etc, etc, and therefore he wouldn’t be giving us any.

He came today and did in fact bring us 2 litres of oil in an old wine bottle, but he was still grumbling about diesel, and time spent pruning, and did I say diesel? (He takes a short cut across someone else’s land to come to our olive grove; it’s no distance at all!)

I reminded him our arrangement wasn’t that he had all of the oil, and suggested that in future he shouldn’t start picking if he thought the crop was so poor it wasn’t worth it.

We’re a bit dubious about the provenance of the oil he gave us. How clean was the bottle, for example? We normally get a sealed metal can straight from the press.

We’ll certainly have uses for it, though.

Blowing the whistle

The whistle that seems to have lost its magic

This bone whistle, which I once wrongly thought was a ‘dog whistle’ - that is, one which sounds at frequencies audible to dogs but not to humans - was a godsend until today.

I’ve been calling Kepler with it, using a rapid piping note, and eventually, for the most part, he’s appeared on the path between the orchard and the olive grove on his way back from the neighbours’.

This morning, piping as I went, I walked on the slippery, frosty path through the far olive grove (invisible from the house) as far as the deep ditch that separates our land from the neighbours’ house which is on the opposite bank.

There was Kepler in his Elizabethan collar, running around with their dogs which number at least 4.

He started down the bank towards me twice, then seemed to be discouraged by the terrain, which is steep and wooded like that of a natural citadel.

The whistle was mainly useful in letting the humans know I was there.

“Go to Mummy! Don’t you want to go to Mummy?” This in dulcet tones from the wife who was hanging out clothes.

“He’s no problem to us,” called the husband.

“It is a problem to us,” I called back. “Our other dogs are worried and can’t settle. He’s part of a pack and he’s getting split loyalties.”

“Shall I bring him round to you?” offered the husband.

“No, thank you all the same. He needs to come back on his own.” I had visions of the husband starting up his car, opening his gate and driving round, which is what he normally does when he comes to see us.

“If you make him unwelcome he’ll go away. Turn a hose on him!” I suggested.

“We couldn’t do that.”

“Do you want to keep him?”

“Noooo!!!”

I thought not. Down-town guy and all that.

I don’t know quite what they did next – said “Shoo!” or something.

Anyway he hurtled down the slope this time without stopping, overshot me, circled the olive grove twice, and then accompanied me indoors where I gave him a handful of his dried food.

A nice peaceful start to Sunday morning.