The seasons in Puglia are incredibly distinct and when the Summer arrives it's like God, or Silvio Berlusconi, has flipped a switch. The switch got flipped this week, sending the temperatures above 30 centigrade and making us realise that olive pruning can be postponed no longer. Actually Erminia has been dropping hints for weeks. Until three years ago her husband, old Paolo, would come over to supervise. This involved me holding the ladder while he wobbled at the top of it, pruning, swigging wine and farting by turns or (infinitely preferable) me at the top of the ladder while Paolo hollered instructions and poked me with a long stick from below - "taglia! (cut) "lascia!" (leave). The old bugger's been dead a while now, but those words still ring in my ears while I am pruning. Now we are left to our own devices as Erminia's arthritic hips means she no longer ventures far into our fields either.
Every part of the Mediterranean has its own pruning technique which makes something essentially simple seem very complicated. To cut (or prune) a long story short - olive trees are not trees at all, but bushes that behave rather like roses. To make them trees and to make the trees productive they need regular pruning. Pruning styles vary depending on how the olives are harvested and how much value is placed on the bi-product of firewood and kindling. Up here, where olives 
have traditionally been harvested by hand, the trees are pruned to create ladder holds. They are also pruned hard as a high value is placed here on wood for the hearth and the kitchen. We don't need the wood and we use a harvesting machine so we don't need ladders either, but we still try to copy the traditional local pruning style, partly for aesthetic reasons and partly because we couldn't bear the aggravation we would get from Erminia if we attempted to do otherwise.
On a hot day it's a real joy to be out in our fields with the saw and the secateurs, cutting one's way upwards through the canopy of olive leaves into the dazzling sunshine. Because the work is seasonal it takes me back to seasons gone by and inevitably I think of Old Paolo and our little dog Milly too, who would happily chase lizards or dig for moles as Sue and I laboured away. It seems right that we buried her among the olive trees.
have traditionally been harvested by hand, the trees are pruned to create ladder holds. They are also pruned hard as a high value is placed here on wood for the hearth and the kitchen. We don't need the wood and we use a harvesting machine so we don't need ladders either, but we still try to copy the traditional local pruning style, partly for aesthetic reasons and partly because we couldn't bear the aggravation we would get from Erminia if we attempted to do otherwise.
On a hot day it's a real joy to be out in our fields with the saw and the secateurs, cutting one's way upwards through the canopy of olive leaves into the dazzling sunshine. Because the work is seasonal it takes me back to seasons gone by and inevitably I think of Old Paolo and our little dog Milly too, who would happily chase lizards or dig for moles as Sue and I laboured away. It seems right that we buried her among the olive trees.
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