A perfect complement to veggies, we have our own olive oil

Growing up no dish was complete without a splash or two or three of olive oil. Whether that be a salad, steamed green beans or roasted carrots there always was olive added to the dish.

We are super excited to announce that we have Farmboy Organic Extra Virgin olive oil that will be for sale beginning at the Davis Farmers Market this Saturday.

This unexpected opportunity we got this summer to lease part of the olive grove at Mike and Dianne Madison’s has been so much fun and it is the perfect complement to the veggies we have been solely focused on.

It will be a blend of all of the olive trees we have harvested so far that it is certified organic and unfiltered being harvested less than two weeks ago. We still haven’t even bottled it, that will happen on Friday.

We’ve been working behind the scenes for the last few months after this opportunity came up to sort out all the details and prepare for olive harvest season.

There are many different tasks to do in preparing for olives compared to veggies and we are very lucky to have Mike guiding us as we lease a part of the olive grove he has tended over the last three decades.

He has been showing us how to best hand harvest the olives without damaging them too much and all the tricks of the trade he has gained from his experience of testing out every possible way to harvest.

The harvest is the simple part of the operation which is easier to learn but the milling or pressing of the olives is much more complex so it will take much longer for us to learn how to do that. Mike has a state-of-the-art Italian olive mill that only processes olives from the olive grove on the farm so there is no chance of contamination.

One of the amazing parts of this opportunity is that the olives are able to be milled small batches on the farm in a mill that is certified organic. We don’t need to harvest all the olives at once like most farms and are able to get slightly different flavors in the oil as a result of that.

Also that means we don’t have to hire a big crew to come harvest it all at once and have the risk of the olives going bad if they have to sit too long because there is an issue with the mill.

This batch and the early ones have a more peppery flavor to them and the olives that are harvested and milled in December will be more mild.

To be considered extra virgin olive oil it has to be milled within 24 hours and that is what we are able to with these olives due to having a mill on the farm.

After being milled it sits in a tank and the sediment from the olive mash settles at the bottom and the olive oil becomes much clearer.

Each variety is slightly different and there are Italian, Spanish, Greek and other varieties that Mike has planted to see which ones are the best for that location.

We will only have a blend of all the varieties we are harvesting this year but maybe in the future we will separate some specific varieties that standout to us.

In almost as exciting news we are starting to harvest carrots today for market. They got confused by the hot weather earlier in the fall so they are a few weeks later than we hoped for but still very delicious.

We aim to have carrots all winter long although it is a hard goal to achieve between the low germination that can happen and the time difference for the later plantings to grow to the right size take.

On Monday we only got a tenth of an inch of rain even though they were forecasting up to half an inch leading up to it. That meant we were able to get lots of work done on the farm taking down the strings from most of the tomatoes that are done for the year.