Spring into Summer

The pace at the Farm has picked up. Things started off the first week in May with another successful Big Valley Small Farm Tour. We spent the week before mowing, weeding, sweeping and generally sprucing the place up for our visitors. We had a tasting table ready for the over 200 folks who came to see what was happening behind our arched gates. For this Tour, we had plenty of gold medal winning extra virgin olive oil available to sell. People were curious to see the inside of the barn, the tractor and of course, the trees. We partnered with neighboring farms along Soda Bay Road: Edenberry Farm, The Ripe Choice Farm , Peace and Plenty Farm and Bell Haven Flower Farm.

Moraiolo Blossoms

A month later and we’ve started seeing quite a few blossoms — after wondering for a week or so whether we will have decent efflorescence in the olive orchard. Now of course we wait to see if the winds come at the right time to send sufficient pollen from enough trees, especially from the pollinator trees - the Pendolino and Maurino - to achieve abundant fruit set. Abundant, but not too abundant so we see good oil content in the olives next fall. Farmers are always holding their breath about timing: temperature, blossoms, fruit set, correct watering at the all stages of olive development and most important of all — timing of the harvest. Harvest needs to happen before a hard frost but late enough for the olives to develop a good percentage of oil

Rosa californica, Campodonico Olive Farm

A Special Recipe for a Special Dog Friend

Olive oil is not just for people - it’s good for your dog. Using extra virgin olive as part of your pet’s regular diet can help maintain a beautiful shining coat. It is also a great supplement if your dog gets only dry food for its diet. Here is a recipe for a tasty and nutritious treat for your canine companion.

Bear’s Liver Biscuits

[excerpted from The Passionate Olive by Carol Firenze]

Ingredients

• 12 ounces oat flour

• 12 ounces rolled oats

• 3 bouillon cubes

• 2 eggs

• 1 cup cold water

• 1 pound liver puréed in the food processor (preferably from organically raised animals)

• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Preparation

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees

• Mix ingredients and pour into a 13 x 9-inch greased pan

• Bake for 1 hour; let pan cool and then cut contents into squares

• Serve during walks or as treats anytime

• If you freeze the biscuits, they will last up to 6 months

Looking Forward to the Big Valley Small Farm Tour May 7th

We are excited to be part of the tour this time of year when the Big Valley is wearing its springtime finery. We will have our gold medal winning Extra Virgin Olive Oil available to taste and to sell. Rich will be your tour guide again, talking about raising olive trees and harvesting. There will be four other farms along Soda Bay Road in Lake County opening their gates to welcome you as well.

We Won Our Second Gold at the LA International EVOO Competition!!

The winners have been announced! We were awarded a gold medal for our 2021 Campodonico Olive Farm Extra Virgin Olive Oil in the Los Angeles International EVOO Competition. This is our second medal from them. We won a gold in 2020, the last time the competition was held. This Tuscan blend, single estate oil has proved to be a favorite for customers all over the United States - from New York to Texas to Hawaii.

Please see our SHOP page.

Winter Activities When It Feels Like Spring

January and most of February felt like spring, some days reaching 75 degrees. Days may still be short, but with the extra rains in October and the warms days this winter the grass grew early and thick. Despite the frosty early mornings and late sunrise we are motivated to get out in the orchard for an earlier-than-usual mowing and tilling in the orchard.

Then there is the list of things we often put off until we are too busy again in the late spring with pruning and fertilizing… But no excuses when it’s warm and the sun is shining. So over the past several weeks, we put up the bluebird box hoping for a bluebird family, painted the mower so it looked new again, sharpened the mower blades for a cleaner cut and generally used the tractor forks to clean up and move stuff.

Ripe Choice Farm

Ripe Choice Farm

Took the tractor for a short rode trip on Soda Bay Road over to the Ripe Choice Farm to till the area where the Lipps have planned a big vegetable garden to supply their catering business. Look forward to tasting some great Lake County sun-ripened. tomatoes!

Certified Extra Virgin Olive - Part of your New Year's Resolution for a heart-healthy diet

As we’ve done since 2015, we had our 2021 oil tested for its extra virgin olive oil status. Our oil is submitted to a lab, which tests its free fatty acid and polyphenol levels, among other qualities. Our yearly test continue to show low acidity and high polyphenol levels.* An internationally recognized taste panel then subjects the oil to rigorous tasting to make sure it has no flavor defects, which would disqualify the oil from being extra virgin. In this way our careful practices in the orchard and handling of the olives at harvest are validated. And our customers can be assured that our oil is truly a healthy and delicious product.

“A Mediterranean diet rich in extra virgin olive oil has many health benefits. Some of these benefits come from extra virgin olive oil’s proven ability to fight chronic disease from its high percentage of mono-unsaturated fatty acids, richness in antioxidants and vitamin E, and abundance of polyphenol compounds. These unique components not only make extra virgin olive oil taste delicious but also contribute to its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects.” — California Olive Oil Council (https://cooc.com/health-nutrition/)

If a healthier diet is part of your 2022 New Year’s resolutions, then try including our organic extra virgin olive oil from olives grown exclusively on our farm here in Lake County, California.

*If you are interested in the math, our 2021 oil here are our lab results: free fatty acid is 0.24% oleic and the total polyphenol is 544.0 mg eq GA/kg.

2021 Harvest - A Bumper Crop

We have discovered that there is such a thing in agriculture as a “bumper crop” and this was a bumper year for us. We harvested three times more olives this year than our last highest year in 2019. The Frantoio were extremely heavy with fruit. The Lecchino weren’t far behind.

The harvest was accomplished over two and a half days with a crew of about thirty aided by our kids who were able to join us. Ladders were moving about like tall giraffes among the trees. The macro bins were constantly being filled and several trips were made to the mill with our bounty.

Once the olives were at the mill, Chacewater millers were busy from early in the morning to late afternoon milling our olives into oil. We always taste right out of the final centrifuge. It’s a very robust, peppery, strong fruity flavor on our palate. All told we loaded up about 200 gallons of oil on the truck for the drive to Fairfield where the oil is bottled into our signature Campodonico Olive Farm EVOO 375 ml bottles. We expect to be ready to sell oil by mid-November online and in person in the SF Bay Area and Lake County. Sign up for our newsletter update on our home page: https://www.campodonico-olives.com/ for more details.

We’ve had some generous rains after harvest and that’s good for the trees who have spent so much energy producing our Tuscan olives. The roots are now free to seek nutrients in the rain-soaked soil. We are grateful that we have had such a successful year, despite the severe drought and prolonged summer heat.

A Second Covid Spring and Summer -- Clearer Skies, Drought and Three-Digit Temperatures

Plenty has been going on at the Farm since our 2020 Harvest. Our crop may have been small last year, but we were rewarded for our efforts with a gold medal from the California Olive Oil Council. We sold out early — thanks to our loyal customers. For those of you left wanting additional oil this past year, it looks like we will have plenty to last throughout the year as the trees are showing a bumper crop of olives.

Clearly this has been the hottest summer we’ve experienced in Lake County: a series of 4 to 5 days of 100 plus degree weather occurred from June to September. The drought, heat and constant threat of wildfires have been deeply concerning to everyone, not just the farmers. We did have a lovely Spring, though, and it’s good to remember that the farm will green up once again.

April at the Farm brought green to the fields and brilliant blue skies.

The Farm has weathered the drought fairly well, though many of the native trees surrounding our fields are stressed. We hope like crazy that the 2021-2022 rainy season actually brings significant rainfall. With so little moisture in the ground from winter rains, the weeds didn’t have a chance in the unirrigated parts of the farm. We saved a lot of time and fossil fuels because we haven’t had to mow since Spring. The cover crop of favas and peas also showed the effects of drought, only growing about 18 inches tall in the rows. We mowed the cover crop at the point it where it just started to form seed pods. One tilling and we left that ground alone until we dragged it recently with a new piece of equipment we had built at AAA Welding in Lakeport. Low till and no till this year.

Right after tilling we brought in Horacio to prune the older orchard, which consists of 4 1/2 acres of about 680 trees. He worked to clear out the middle of the trees and encourage bearing branches on the outside of the trees, making harvesting much easier and more efficient. Horacio accomplished in two weeks what we tried to do in four months last year.

Everyone in Big Valley has been complaining about the unusual numbers of ground squirrels and yellow jackets. Ground squirrels are big nuisances in the orchards because of their constant tunneling beneath the trees. Neighbors reported that ground squirrels chewed through the hydraulic lines on their tractor. We trap some of them in the hopes of slowing the population down. As we get into Fall, we are seeing fewer and fewer of them. As for the yellow jackets — the danger there is pretty clear. A yellow jacket sting can be anywhere from briefly painful to life threatening. We couldn’t seem to destroy their nests with the usual off-the-shelf products or home remedies like boiling water. And we were hesitant to pour gasoline down the yellow jacket holes. Our answer was to distract and trap as many as we could, by hanging the traps directly over the nest entrances.

We ticked off a number of projects this year. The pergola by the house is complete and we have new planters filled with viburnum and native plants that will attract birds and pollinators. We now have an inviting gathering spot — for when life opens up again and we can get together freely.

Years in the planning, we finally created an inviting space at the entrance to the farmhouse.

We continued to work on bat exclusion from the house and have been grateful to see that many bats have taken up residence in their proper bat houses on the side of the barn. Another bird exclusion project was completed in the barn to keep blackbirds and finches from nesting in the precarious places they seem to love in the upper reaches of the barn rafters. More nests fell down than survived in the barn. For some reason, the tops of ladders and brooms also seemed to be their favorite nesting spots. We hope that more birds will join their friends in the orchard where the olive trees make excellent and well-protected spots for nests. We also spent some time putting metal sheaths on the house siding where flickers loved to chip away chunks of wood. We nailed up bird netting to keep them from pecking away at the attic vents. As the summer months passed, we saw and heard fewer and fewer of the flickers in the slough and none at the house or barn. Has the drought driven them away entirely?

We are pretty happy about the 700-foot hedgerow we started planting two years ago on the western edge of our orchard. With some watering, weeding and mulching it has mostly flourished. We’ve learned that the California native rose, buckwheat, sugarbush, quailbush, buckbrush, yarrow, deer grass, and goldenrod are varieties of natives that flourish here in the Big Valley where temperatures are well below freezing in the winter and hit 100 degree plus for many days in the summer. We have birds feeding off the seeds and various pollinators - including honeybees from next door and bumblebees busy among the abundant flowers.

Harvest is about a month away. The Farm has seen another cycle of seasons.

2020 Harvest - Different This Year - of Course!

Looking back at past harvests we always enjoy seeing our friends and family picking olives for a couple of days and celebrating with a Harvest Dinner afterwards. This year, we hired a professional crew who brought their own equipment and picked our olives in a couple of days the last week of November ahead of killing frosts. Instead of using our electric combs, they preferred using picking buckets and ladders.

We watched and learned and saw that in the future when we are all back together again, we will probably do a hybrid harvest: a hired crew and friends and family. Our orchard is maturing still and we expect we will need the help of a local crew to pick the olives in order to get them to the mill quickly.

Two things were significant about the 2020 harvest: This was an “off” year for the trees, meaning production was down from last year, but because we harvested before any killing frosts, we were able to harvest from all the varieties of trees. We are very pleased with the quality. However, 2020 oil quantities are limited.

Our Long Summer - COVID and Smoke - Lots of Pruning

The Pandemic of 2020 translated into a simplification of life here on the farm. Since social activities were curtailed and the additional challenges of thick smokey air from major fires all over Northern California meant we often stayed indoors, alternating between sheltering in place in the Bay Area and spending as many days as we could at the farm when the air cleared, pruning trees in the “Old Orchard.” From June to October the two of us went tree by tree, row by row taking out the low hanging branches and opening up the center of the trees. Harvesting will be easier and the trees more resistant to pests.

Since we had tilled the rows earlier in the spring, we avoided mowing the orchard all summer, giving us more time to tend to the trees and the hedgerow. The native plants in the hedgerow flourished during the summer with regular irrigation and weeding, even during the hottest days. The ceanothus concha bloomed a deep blue and the ceanothus ‘Ray Hartman’ bloomed a violet blue early in the summer. The native rose had delicate pink flowers all summer while the yarrow waited until July to bloom orange and yellow. In August, under very smokey skies the buckwheat bloomed yellow-white flower puffs. The hedgerow has a long bloom season so that the native pollinators and the local honeybees have plenty of sustenance for about six months of the year. And once the hedgerow plants grow to be four to eight feet tall and wide, the hedgerow will become a shelter for gopher snakes, quail and a host of other birds.