Posted on

The Olive Harvest

From late October through to the end of November – and sometimes later – you’ll start to see people out on their land, the ground covered in large nets, as they rake the small, odd, bitter fruit from their olive trees.

We have about 25 – 30 olive trees here at Casale Volpe, and this year is our second year of harvesting. Last year was a pretty poor one for us with only around 14kg of olives in total, but like many fruit trees, there’s a tendency to have a high production one year with almost nothing the next. Needless to say, this year has been a bumper crop for us. In total, we picked 157kg of olives, with one beautiful tree (no favourites here, but if we had to pick one…) netting us a whopping 50kg.

We picked over 3 days – sharing the load with some local friends – in both rain and sun, spending the evenings sharing wine and food as we cleaned the olives of all the leaves and general detritus. Once finished we took the whole lot to our lovely local oleificio where they went through various processes to become cold-pressed olive oil.

Fancy an olive-picking holiday?

There’s nothing like tasting this peppery green liquid gold, straight from the press, so if you’ve not experienced it, we can highly recommend it. Next year we’ll be inviting guests to get stuck in with the harvest with a trip to the oleificio to watch the pressing process, followed by a tasting of the end result with some simple bruschetta and maybe a slice or two of pecorino cheese. Get in touch with us if you like the idea of climbing tress, drinking wine and watching some crazy old machinery turn olives into oil. Click on the photos below to get a sense of the goings on in the oleificio.

In the meantime, when you come to stay with us, you’ll no doubt get to taste the oil on pizza, bruschetta, tomatoes, pasta… you get the idea.

Posted on

Italian Vegetable Garden

We’re on a mission to be as self-sufficient as possible here at Casale Volpe – with our vegetables, fruit and (coming soon, care of some hens), our own eggs. Neither of us has lived a rural life before. In the past, the most we’ve had to contend with is a small (typically north-facing) London garden, which did little more than give slugs and snails the perfect home.

Now, with almost 10 acres of land, we’re putting down the first roots – pun intended – of self-sufficiency, with the start of our vegetable garden and planting of some fruit trees.  Whilst you can easily and cheaply buy small veggie plants here, we’re growing as much as we can from seed. Not only does this create another layer of satisfaction (ok, we mean smugness here), but it allows us a much wider range of interesting and heritage vegetables to grow.

Starting tentatively

So we don’t fail at the first hurdle, we’ve started with the easier crops, planting the seeds earlier in the spring for this summer. Right now we have four varieties of tomato (one being San Marzano for cooking, as no Italian orto would be without them), borlotti beans, zucchini (we’ve also been stuffing and frying the flowers), purple french beans, yellow french beans, two types of chard, lettuce, aubergines, peppers, a whole plethora of herbs and some companion plants such as nasturtiums.

We’re now starting to plan the winter crops, such as red cabbage, romanesco cauliflower – which is actually closer to broccoli but with a seriously mesmerising pattern of growth  – and cavalo nero – a favourite topping for bruschetta. The great thing about this is picking and planning meals as the different vegetables are ready to eat. This will be our approach when putting together meal menus and picnics for our guests, so you’re always eating the freshest of fresh, packed with tons of flavour, at exactly the moment it’s supposed to be eaten.