Olive grove. Crushing of pruning cuttings

As we commented in one of our post of last month, one of the tasks that we carried out in the olive grove over these last months has been the pruning, both on young olive trees and on those we have in full production. These pruning tasks on the olive trees in production are usually done every year, although one year we practice an aggressive pruning and the following year a much lighter pruning. This year we have not made a very aggressive pruning and therefore we have not gathered excessive amount of pruning cuttings. On the young olive trees we prune every year and the objective is very different, since its aim is to form the tree without removing too many leaves because you can't decompensate the relation leaf-root. On large olive trees, when pruning is done, we think it is best to cut with a chainsaw, so imagine the size of pruning cuttings that are usually generated.

In December we bought a second-hand iD-David crushing machine. The truth is that we had been looking for a crushing machine for months and we quite liked this one (iD-David is a very specialized Spanish company in machinery for woody crops). We bought it in Talleres Marsemar (Villarrobledo - Albacete) and we have used it a lot (both for crushing olive and almond tree pruning cuttings). We had a very good feeling when we worked with it. The crushing machine is the iD-David TD-SO and it requires a tractor of at least 120 HP as it needs power when starting... we use it with our Agrotron M600 (130 HP) and the tractor works really fine at 1,700 r.p.m. of engine and 490 r.p.m. of PTO...  the crushing machine suffers a lot when many wood cuttings come in, especially wood of almond.

The aim of crushing the branches is to be able to incorporate these pruning remains into the soil because the pieces of wood end up decomposing and being incorporated into the soil as organic matter. We think this could be a very good choice for the olive grove and almond trees. Moreover, in Andalusia, the crushing of branches has been done for many years and the results are very positive.

Versión en español.

The vegetable garden 2020

One of the tasks that begins when spring arrives, especially with the month of May, is the work in the vegetable garden. Having a vegetable garden is a hobby that our father loves as it allows him to enjoy himself a natural environment. However, this hobby requires a lot of time because there are many and varied tasks to perform. The vegetable garden provides us with fresh vegetables from July until September, so we practice the consumption of proximity and have fresh products of maximum quality throughout the summer.

We have now carried out tasks of soil preparation and planting. As you can see in our pictures, the soil has been prepared with the cultivator. Besides, a good dose of manure has been poured to help the plants grow quickly and the metal structure (cage) has been installed, there the plants will be supported when they grow (especially the tomato plants). After that, we have planted tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, pumpkins, etc. The next tasks will be to set up the irrigation system and to continue planting other types of vegetables.

We will update the post as we do the different tasks and the plants grow... if anyone wants to try the products, we'll be waiting for you here.

Versión en español.