The English Olive Press; October ‘26
Autumn has arrived, and we now have longer nights and shorter days! The olives are still being treated to some kind weather, and we just need to deter the birds and the winter storms to enable an improved harvest for 2026. With healthy lifestyle options becoming ever more desirable we learn and share some of the health benefits of olive oil.
Hello and welcome to our October newsletter, giving you updates on what we have been up to in September. Grove maintenance has involved giving the trees their final branch and sucker pruning, and we have been mowing the grass and flower margins between the rows of trees, now that the flowers have died back. The olives are maturing at different rates, but as with most crops this year, then harvest will be slightly earlier than expected due to the warmer weather.
In the middle of the month we were very fortunate to have a visit from Kate and Christopher who have vast experience in nutrition and hospitality respectively. Kate is a registered Nutritional Therapy Practitioner and primarily focuses on nutrition, diet and lifestyle for your brain and whole body health. With our growing knowledge on the health benefits from olive oil consumption, it was a pleasure to learn more from Kate first hand. Christopher shared insights into the hospitality sector, which gave us ideas for the future, where we hope to open up the olive grove for tours, tastings and events.
Kate has kindly shared many research papers on the proven health benefits of olive oil, and if any of you would like a copy of this summary with links, then please do email us at hello@englisholive.co.uk for a copy. As part of our soon to be shared olive oil info graphic, Kate also helped shape the content of our health benefits from olive oil section, which can be seen for the first time in the hearts below.
As our olive oil supply hopefully continues to grow as the trees grow in size and maturity, we will continue to try and share some of the wonderful health benefits of consuming olive oil on a daily basis. If you would like to find out more about Kates work, and especially on nutrition, brain health and dementia risk-avoidance please visit her website here.
We are very grateful to Kate and Christopher for their visit, and we look forward to building on our learnings.
Kate from Eat Drink Think Nutrition visits David at the olive grove, and an insight into part of our soon to be released olive oil info-graphic.
Our learning of olive grove management in England continues to grow, and the agronomic practices we use continue to evolve. We have had many successes but also many failures, which has resulted in us losing a few hundred trees (which was part of the budget!). We have gained much knowledge from our Mediterranean olive grower friends, but timings of practises and the ways different varieties perform are very differently in England, even with the very warm spring and summer we have had. Our trees branches generally grow for 4-5 months of the year, from June until September time, when the weather is nice and warm for the olive tree. In the Med the trees grow nearly exactly the opposite time to this, with their summer often being to hot for the trees, so their timings of pruning and sucker removal are very different. Their tree growth extends over the winter when they have lower temperatures and more rainfall, and from looking at trees planted at the same time as our grove, then their extended growing period each year results in their young trees being significantly bigger and more productive than ours in these early years.
We are also improving on the timings of pruning our olive tree varieties. We are seeing that some varieties are more vigorous than others, and require pruning 3-4 times during the growing period to establish the optimum branch length, while we are still forming the shape and structure of the trees in these early years. If we let the branches get too long before we snip off the growing point to then encourage a branch, a long branch can have a higher chance of snapping in the wind or breaking from the future weight of fruit. Other varieties are slower growing and require less frequent pruning, with the last pruning being 6 weeks earlier than some others. This allows the new branches time to grow before the winter frosts potentially burn off the growing point again, which could make super short branches with very few fruiting sites if we pruned too late.
Our olive grove is pesticide free and fungicide free, so encouraging beneficial pests to eat the undesirable pests is a priority. In July and August the privet hawk moth caterpillar visited us again, which was expected from previous years learnings. We have tried to encourage more birds to the olive grove to eat the caterpillars, by erecting nesting boxes, and the natural higher number of insects in the grove due to no insecticides being used also helps encourage the birds. The rapid defoliation of the trees by these large caterpillars can be very destructive, and has lead to the a few of the attacked trees drying, while others are recovering.
The olives on the trees are maturing now, gaining oil content and becoming more palatable. Wildlife has spotted this, and we now find ourselves in the ironic position of the birds that we are encouraging to the olive grove to eat the caterpillars are now eating the olives! We have seen crows sitting on the tree stakes eating and pulling off the olives and found owl pellets in the grove with olive stones in. With nature being smarter than us, they are however a very useful guide as to which varieties are approaching maturity first!
The destructive effect of the private hawk caterpillar causing some trees to die. Birds eating and pulling off some of the olives.
As we approach the last month before harvest starts we are reminded and rewarded by how brilliant the olive tree is. Two of the ten varieties are not enjoying life in England, and we have 20-30% death rates in these, but the other varieties are performing really well. When visitors come to the farm to talk business about peas or potatoes or flax, they often ask where are the olive trees which have the fruit on for this years olive oil - we politely tell them that the small but mighty olive trees they have driven past are the such trees!
Some of the trees have had a growth spurt this year, and are now reaching 1.5-1.8m tall, but do not have many olives on them. Other varieties are 1.0-1.5m tall and are loaded with olives, cramming all their branches with fruit! If we keep the birds at bay and miss the early winter storms then harvest 2026 will be larger volume, and also looks like being slightly earlier, possibly starting late October.
One ‘scruffy’ small but prolific variety (first picture below) has a very good quantity of olives on most trees, and so we will be working with our farmer friend, Nigel from Norfolk, who has a self propelled harvester to gather the fruits from this variety. Nigel uses his harvester for his blackcurrants (going to a well know blackcurrant squash brand), but also does contracting work for vineyards in Norfolk. The olive and grape growers in the Mediterranean use the same machine, with a few tweaks, to harvest both crops, so we are fortunate to have Nigel near by to help harvest this bountiful variety.
Once again we will be looking for volunteers to help hand pick the other varieties, so when we know a clearer time period when this will be we will let you, our Newsletter readers know first, in case you fancy a few hours in the Lincolnshire Fens, with the reward of being pioneering pickers, and some warm refreshments! As mentioned earlier, we envisage this to start at the end of October and progress into November…..we will be in touch!
Different varieties showing their different levels of fruiting.
Our on site olive washing, milling, bottling and labelling facility is being serviced and made ready for harvest 2026, and our packaging and post out solutions are being sourced and tested in readiness for our 2026 English Olive Oil. Thank you all for being so patient and understanding in our limited English olive oil supply last year, and to manage expectations, 2026 supply will still be limited, but an improved supply, as the trees continue to grow and mature. We do have our English olive grove honey and our English olive leaf tea available to buy online here, and also a range of olive wood gifts and merchandise for you and your home available now, while you wait for the olive harvest!
We look forward to keeping you updated on harvest helpers and the progress in the olive grove.
Best wishes, David