This isn't a hard day's work

about 2 years ago

I have written three words under my profile picture:

Farmer, photographer, traveller...

in an attempt to briefly describe the main aspects of my daily life. The photographer part is always there, more or less active, but there. The other two seem to compete with each other and every time one of them is gaining, the other one loses. In 2022 the traveller part seems to be the winner and as you may have noticed, my gardening posts are very rare and poor! Nevertheless I am not giving up on anything, those three pylons of my life still stand and after 2 months of travelling, I am ready to spend the next two, on the olive grove!

Yesterday was the day of the "repérage", which simply means that @traisto and myself took a long walk at the farm to check the olive trees and plan the harvesting schedule. Our main concern was the damage caused by the olive fly, the notorious (at the areas that produce olive oil) Dacus oleae that is feeding from the olive fruits and lay its eggs inside the fruit. Depending on the weather conditions, that small fly is responsible for the destruction of a considerable part of the production and in same cases, even a total loss of the crop!

One valuable ally in our battle against the vicious insect, are the spiders! Quiet and effective they are doing a pretty decent job if you just let them be and not destroy their web by walking back and forth the whole time. But unfortunately they are not enough.

Although it is a very common practice, spraying the trees with poison is not an option for us. So we turn to the solutions used on organic farming. This doesn't give us a 100% protection but we still have a lot of beautiful, healthy and free of chemicals olives, to produce our organic extra virgin olive oil!

But this isn't a hard day's work so we can just sit back and enjoy the view that we have missed so much, while we were away :)

The cold of the winter is not here yet but picking up some firewood before it does, is a wise thing to do!

I may have been a lousy gardener lately but fortunately, my land is blessed with volunteer herbs that grow and flourish without any care on my part! This beauty is one of the most important herbs for the bees since it is the last abundant blooming before winter. I am not sure about the name in English but it should be whorled heath. In Greek it is called ρείκι and we have two kinds of it. One that it blooms in the spring and this one that blooms in autumn. If you know how it is called please let me know.

This was meant to be a #gardenjournal post and it actually is. You can find all the information about the November challenge here.

But as my photographer part is always alert, I couldn't hold myself from taking a few pictures with no particular gardening interest but with amazing light :)
I hope you'll enjoy them!

I'll end this post with one picture of myself for the selfie challenge. Actually it is not a selfie since @traisto took the shot but I'll count on the big heart and flexibility of @riverflows :)