Pruning olive trees is a rigorous job. When we started doing this in March, we had already seen in the neighbourhood that little remains of the beautiful foliage of the trees. A trunk and one or two sad, thin branches is all that’s left. The rest is sawn off, ends up in a big heap and finds a new destination on our land.
Pruning schedule
We don’t have to prune all our olive trees every year. Fortunately, because that would take an eternity with our more than 250 trees. Every year there is a specific zone that needs to be worked on to give the trees a new impulse. This means that these trees will not bear fruit that year, because olives only grow on branches that are at least one year old. So the harvest has to come from our other trees. That explains why you don’t want to prune everything in the same year.
Unexpected expenses
The branches of the olive tree are thick and hard, so we soon found out that our electric saw was not going to do the job. There was no other option than to buy a chainsaw. This was typically something we had never thought of beforehand when we made a budget for our move to Portugal. In retrospect a bit stupid, because it was quite obvious that we would need some powerful tools on such a large piece of land, but it hadn’t occurred to us.
Our friendly neighbour told us to go the village of Urra. This is more than ten kilometres from our house and about 2000 people live there. Not the first place we would expect to find a chainsaw store, but why not? Five hundred euros later we were ready for action!
Pruning waste
Unbelievable how many branches come from one tree. In no time we had huge piles of branches stacked up. We decided to leave it for now, but already knew that we had to come up with an idea to use it for something, because due to the risk of fire, leaving pruning waste on your land in Portugal is out of the question.
Cutting wires
Something went wrong when pruning the olive tree next to the well. By cutting away a branch, a cable fell down that turned out to be hanging in the olive tree. The cable ran over the road via wooden poles on our property, to a pole on the other side of the road. The cable swept down and kept dangling on our fence, hanging over the road. Oops, now what? What kind of cable is this? Did we drape an electrical wire across the road? What if a tall car hits the wire? Who should we call to fix that?
Because we had no idea of the answer to all these questions, we had to once again call for the help of our neighbour. We walked to his house, explained our stupid action, and he got in his car to come and have a look (yes, it’s far enough to drive).
“It’s the CTT’s telephony cables,” he concluded. Fortunately, no electricity! “Do you make use of that?”. Uh… Do we make use of that? Didn’t think so, right? Everything goes through the satellite dish, doesn’t it? We were hesitant, so the neighbour took a closer look. The cable across our land eventually ended up at our house, but turned out not to be connected to anything. According to the neighbour, we were the only ones who could be using this cable, so he saw a simple solution: “We’ll cut the cable.”
And so a little later we were cutting a cable just like that. It felt strange to do that, as it runs to a public pole, but the neighbour emphasized that it really wouldn’t bother anyone. Okay, cut then. Then all was left was tying the end of the wire around the pole on the other side of the road and we were done. Another drama averted. Now just continue pruning like nothing ever happened.
