Olives and Olive oil

 

"Except the vine, there is no plant which bears a fruit of as great importance as the olive."

Pliny (AD 23-79)

From the windows of the high speed train from Madrid to Granada, rows of olive trees stretch to the horizon.   Up and down hills, curving around bends, marching off into the distance.   Small fields of knarled misshapen old trees, long fields of young uniform trees, newly turned fields of stick-like baby trees – olive trees everywhere.   On the bus between Granada and Seville, same thing.   On the train from Seville to Malaga, ditto.

 Spain grows olives – more than France, more than Italy. In fact, Spain is the world’s largest producer and exporter of olives and olive oil, with 300 million trees. and 92 percent of the 5.19 million acres of olive groves is allotted to olive oil production.  According to the following article, only 20 percent is exported, which means that 80 percent is consumed in Spain.   Which explains a lot.

For more than you probably want to know about Spanish olive oil, olive trees, etc, here’s the link.

http://www.iberianature.com/material/olives.html

Spanish olive oil has been making its way over the Pyrenees and down to Italy since Roman times; archaeologists have unearthed hundreds of huge amphoras used to transport the oil.   Turns out a lot of the ‘Italian’ olive oil in your grocery store may be bottled in Italy, but the olives that produced it came from Spain.  

Olive oil seems to be lifeblood here.  Café tables hold a bottle of extra-virgin, rich and greeny-gold, just like American restaurant tables hold bottles of ketsup.   I watched people at breakfast dousing their tostadas con tomate (my favorite) with at least a quarter cup of olive oil.   It comes on sandwiches and nearly everything else.   It tastes great.   What more could you ask?

Well, you could ask for some of the olives before they get turned into oil.  Every beer and glass of wine in a bar or café come with a small dish of olives, olives come with tapas (or they are tapas), and the grocery shelves have more kinds of olives than Americans have potato chips.  Most of these are green olives, and delicious – not salty, but with a meaty quality I’m still trying to figure out.  The most toothsome ones I tasted were in Malaga, but both Seville and Granada had fantastic ones as wel

Our local olive store in Seville, just down the street from the apartment, let us taste before buying, but we never did find exactly the one we were looking for.  Have to keep trying.

Alhambra

Think of Granada and it's the Alhambra that comes to mind.  A fortress, a palace (several in fact), a citadel, a landmark, a UNESCO World Heritage site - all that.

The Alhambra towers over Granada, and you can see it best from the Albaicin, the old Arab part of the city, which has its own hill.

It looks medieval, as indeed it is, with additions and extensions built over several hundred years.  The best known parts, the Nasrid Palaces and the Generalife (gardens with the summer palace) were built between the 13th and 14th century.   It's a long and complex history:

http://www.alhambradegranada.org/en/info/historicalintroduction.asp

Inside the walls, the gardens and the palaces have a totally different character -serene, elegant, beautiful.

We're here in winter, when it's warm in the sun and chilly at night.   But the gardens here are clearly designed to provide cool restful spots from the heat of summer, along with the music of fountains,

Inside, the rooms and courtyards are decorated with dizzying detail, walls, ceilings, windows, floors - with tile, with wood, with plaster, with stone -

Every doorway and window frames a view, patterns repeat and vary endlessly, and no matter how long you look, you can't take it all in.

Breakfast in Spain

We've escaped the Great Maine Winter for a while and are hiding out in the south of Spain, a wonderful place full of street life, colorful shops and markets, historic buildings and friendly people, who cheerfully put up with my limited Spanish vocabulary.

After all the years of traveling to France, I can't help making comparisons.  Surely the Spanish share the Mediterranean love of good food and eating.  Unlike France, you can find something to eat here almost any time of day - that is, after 10 or so in the morning!

Well, there's no daylight till around 8 am, so even though there really are people heading out to work early, shops and bars and cafes don't really get going till midmorning. 

So in various little places nearby we've sampled a local breakfast - coffee and toast - wonderful crusty Spanish 'baguettes', spread with tomato, dribbled with olive oil (more about the olives later).  Mmm!

Damariscotta Pumpkinfest

Our last art show of the season took us back to Boothbay this weekend, this time to the Railway Village.  It was a gorgeous weekend and a good show, but the most interesting sidelight was our accidental discovery of the Pumpkin Fest.

We usually cut off through Damariscotta to get to Boothbay, since it skips a portion of usually congested Route 1.  Damariscotta is one of those coastal towns that’s pretty enough to enjoy and not so touristy as to be overwhelmed by visitors – most of the time.  Driving through on Friday afternoon, we saw that most of the businesses had giant – really giant – pumpkins stationed outside their front doors, some of the pumpkins in the process of being decorated.  By Saturday morning, a lot of the artists had finished their work and we stopped early to take some pictures and stroll down the main street.  The variety and imagination were fantastic.  They ranged from the scenic

 to the humorous

to the funky and punky

 

and just plain fishy

 

Turns out it’s a whole week of events and activities, the annual Pumptkinfest, with a parade, pie eating contest, pumpkin hurling and all the artwork, painted, carved and assembled.

But what I wondered was – who was providing all these monster pumpkins?  These beauties are a lot bigger than anything you’ve ever seen at a roadside stand.   Well, turns out a local greenhouse with a couple of pumpkin fanatic owners supplies free giant pumpkin seedlings in the spring and amateur gardeners near and far try their hand at growing the maximum pumpkin.  

http://damariscottapumpkinfest.com/Event%20Pages/PEvents%20-%20Plantlet%20Give-Away.html

 For the Pumpkinfest, there’s a Weigh-In and prizes, and a chance to donate your giant veggie to become one of the town’s pumpkin works of art.

Who knew? 

There’s a whole art and science to the raising of giant pumpkins, and I think that if I remember in time next year, I may give it a try.   Apparently, lots of folks do this.

http://www.bigpumpkins.com/

Still haven’t figured out how you get it into the car, though.

What I Did On My Summer 'Vacation'

 

Looking back over the last couple of  months and trying to figure out what it was that filled up the days, and why there are no blog posts, I come back to two things.

I went to art shows with Ed.

I worked on the garden and its produce.

The art show/craft show circuit in the summer is an intense round of put-up-the-tent, put-up-the-art,  take-down-the-art, take-down-the-tent, load up the car, hope it doesn't rain.  And then do it again.

We were lucky to have mostly good weather this season, and mostly good shows.  Once the early work’s done, it’s not really a bad life to have to sit in the sun in a town in Maine on a summer afternoon.  Here’s Ed working hard in Belfast.

 

And of course you see some familiar faces, fellow vendors, passing friends…

And the garden – indeed the plastic owl saved the cherries, the garden overflowed with too much of too many things. It was beautiful while it lasted.

We fought off the striped cucumber beetles, thwarted the birds in the cherries and the earwigs in the peaches, plucked and squished the tomato hornworms – and still the late blight appeared on the heels of a 24 hour rain and wiped out the late maturing tomatoes. 

Gardening’s a series of wins and losses, and the balance is pretty good this year.   But next year…

It's a Hoot

Things are ripening in the garden.   The cherries are almost ready!

Three years ago we had a great cherry crop, but the last two years the birds have beaten us to it.   Last year we came home from one of Ed's art shows and found nothing hanging but the pits.

I like having the birds around, and we feed them generously, on sunflower seeds and suet and grape jelly (for the orioles, but the catbirds and woodpeckers like it too), not to mention all the yummy bugs on the cukes and zucchini right now, and we let them have most of the blackberries, which are coming along nicely.

But not the cherries...

However, the tree's too tall to net - we can't even reach the top.   So after some research on Google and various gardening forums, we've decided on the solution.

Meet Hoot-

According to a variety of garden experts, an owl decoy or owl scarecrow ( made in USA, signed by the artist who modeled him, made of plastic and hollow to be filled with sand for ballast) works like a charm to scare birds away from the vicinity.   Apparently birds don't analyse to think that owls aren't usually out all day or wonder why he doesn't move (though the experts do suggest you move him every few days).   So Hoot sits on his perch watching over the cherries.   To give him a little help, we've also festooned the tree with shiny dangling CD's, a trick I saw in France.  

He only has to hold the other birds at bay for the next two days, while we're gone, because when we get back, either the cherries will be ripe - or disappeared.   Stay tuned.

"We must cultivate our garden."

"Il faut cultiver notre jardin," says Candide at the end of his travels in Voltaire's story.   "We must cultivate our garden."   It's a full-time job.

Summer here is about the garden and travel around Maine and art shows with Ed, the photographer.  We’ll see how it all fits together.

I’ve been working on the spring clean-up, planting, and general garden chores for the last 6 weeks now.   The vegetables are in, the peas are climbing, the beans are up, the asparagus delicious.   The shade garden and perennial beds are weeded, the roses are fertilized and mulched, the raspberries are (mostly) cleaned out.   The parts that get mowed are mowed.   The garden and fields look so neat.   It’s taken the two of us 6 weeks to get to this point.

I know that all this neatness is just an illusion – and temporary.

One day of rain and a couple of days of sun, and all the weeds will be back, the peas will be doing their best to avoid the trellises, and the tomatoes will have suddenly sprawled before I remembered to stake them.   The peonies will bloom and the next downpour will flatten them, at the same time that it knocks over the delphinium stalks and bends their flowers into S curves.  

Bugs I’ve never seen before will materialize and chomp their way through the squash or the eggplants, late blight will blow in from somewhere, and a three day absence will produce what looks like a hayfield instead of a lawn.   The chipmunks will plant sunflower seeds in the middle of the tomatoes.   The bamboo will do its best to jump forward another three feet.  The grapevine will attempt to swallow the deck.

Until August I’ll be racing to catch up, and then, finally, racing to catch up with the sudden bounty of vegetables, tomatoes, apples –  and leaves.

But for right now,  my garden looks very neat.   It’s trying to fool me.