Bottling the 2025 harvest of olive oil
For almost all the crops we grow we can eat them right away but we have to patiently wait a couple of weeks for our extra virgin olive oil.
We don’t filter our olive oil so we have to let the microscopic pieces of pomace settled out of the oil before enjoying the delightful flavors of the olive oil.
Now that we have let the olive oil settle we are bottling up the first of the 2025 harvest this week and we will have it at the Davis Farmers Market Saturday.
In addition to the 500 mL bottle of olive oil that we have been selling we will be also selling the olive oil in a 100 mL bottle. It is the perfect size to gift to everybody for any occasion.
We started harvesting olives two weeks later this year than last and that is only possible due to us having access to an olive mill on the farm instead of having to take the olives somewhere to be pressed where you have a set date to bring them.
It also allows us to harvest over a number of days instead of all at once so the flavor of the oil is differently for the first batch than the last one.
The main change in the flavor is that early on there are lots of green olives which are high in polyphenols and they bring out the pepperiness of the oil. As the olives ripen there is less polyphenols and thus the pepperiness is reduced.
We are only partially through harvesting our olive trees and will be trying to get them harvested in the next two weeks if the weather allows for it. We can’t harvest in the rain and if the olives are wet they don’t come off the trees as easily which makes the harvest much slower.
While still busy on the farm with all the veggies and trees to harvest we are planning what we are growing this upcoming spring and summer at the same time.
To get a jumpstart on the season we seed our first seeds in the greenhouse on January 1 so we need to have the seeds before then. To figure out what veggies and how much of them we need to seed then we are planning all of what we are growing for the spring and summer.
Luckily we don’t have to create the plan from scratch but can just take our crop plan for the 2025 spring and summer and make changes to it. Many of the veggies there we are only slightly adjusting for 2026 as they did well and the biggest challenge we have for them is germination which the crop plan can’t solve.
Finishing our fourth year on the farm we have lots of information and data about what grows well for us when and what does everybody want us to grow. Plus we sometimes try new crops to see if we can grow them well or that people want them.
To have all the spring veggies continuously throughout the spring we can’t plant them once so having a crop plan to figure out how to succession plant them is crucial to make sure we don’t miss a planting.
There are a handful of crops that we spend the majority of our crop planning time on. They are all the kinds of tomatoes, melons, watermelons, peppers, eggplant and lettuce.
For each of those we grow a number of varieties so we decide if the ones we grew can be kept the same or we need to make changes or add more.
We have additional crop planning with the larger parcel we began leasing this year for veggies and we are growing a good amount more this upcoming year there.
