{"id":5277,"date":"2014-10-20T12:24:40","date_gmt":"2014-10-20T12:24:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/?p=5277"},"modified":"2016-04-08T12:26:45","modified_gmt":"2016-04-08T12:26:45","slug":"a-note-from-farmer-al-october-20th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/a-note-from-farmer-al-october-20th\/","title":{"rendered":"A note from farmer Al : October 20th"},"content":{"rendered":"

A NOTE FROM FARMER AL<\/h3>\r\n

Olives<\/h4>\r\nDear CSA member\r\n\r\nWe started picking our olives last Thursday, October 16th, an all-time record\u00a0early harvest for us. The Leccinos, first of our four varieties to ripen were\u00a0black. Leccinos comprise 25% of our trees and this variety ripens all fruit on\u00a0the tree concurrently. Maurinos, which are only 5% of our trees, ripen fruit\u00a0late, so their fruit is solid green when picked. Pendolinos are mostly ripe when\u00a0picked. The Frantoios, making up 60% of our trees are 1\u20442 purple and 1\u20442 green\u00a0at picking time. Remember....we\u2019re picking all these trees, which are planted\u00a0together in rows in the above ratios, at the same time. When taken to the mill\u00a0for milling and pressing, the blend of flavors and different ripeness of these\u00a0four varieties will already be blended in the picking bins.\r\n\r\nThe dominant flavor profile is in the Frantoios, which is one of the most\u00a0widely planted olives worldwide used for oil. It has a great balance of\u00a0fruitiness, bitterness, and pungency. The Pendolinos are unusually sweet for an\u00a0olive. So at 10% of the blend its sweetness is a counterbalance to the grassy\u00a0qualities of the Frantoio. Leccinos offer sweetness and spice to the Tuscsan\u00a0blends.\r\n\r\nWhile most other olive growers in California are now using mechanical\u00a0harvesting equipment to pick their olives, we still do it the old-fashioned\u00a0way, all by hand. And, our trees are big. Most are 15-20 feet high with dense\u00a0heavy growth all around the perimeter. To pick, we often have to actually cut\u00a0the uppermost branches off and bring them down to harvest on the ground.\u00a0So the orchard at harvest time is a scene of devastation, with just picked\u00a0branches lying on the ground. The once towering trees are now slightly\u00a0truncated. But we\u2019ve got to get the olives off somehow, so we cut the highest\u00a0branches down. But this is actually just a way of pruning the trees which\u00a0we do anyway immediately following harvest. In two months we won\u2019t even\u00a0notice the difference. These trees love it here and their re-growth is a wonder\u00a0to behold.\r\n\r\n\"Signature","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A NOTE FROM FARMER AL Olives Dear CSA member We started picking our olives last Thursday, October 16th, an all-time record\u00a0early harvest for us. The Leccinos, first of our four varieties to ripen were\u00a0black. Leccinos comprise 25% of our trees and this variety ripens all fruit on\u00a0the tree concurrently. Maurinos, which are only 5% of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-note-from-farmer-al"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5HwAU-1n7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5277"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5279,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5277\/revisions\/5279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}