An olive mission
Once you’ve tamed the bitterness of an olive, victory is sweet.
My Mission olive tree would be justified in being jealous as hell over all the attention the blimmin’ navel orange tree has been getting. But it’s seen off stiff competition before.
I planted the olive and the kareeboom on the same day, circa September 2017. I’d been inspired by a visit to Richmond, Northern Cape, just off the N1 not far from Hanover, one of the Karoo towns Olive Schreiner once lived in. She lived in Cradock too, and Richmond, and De Aar, and Kimberley, and Matjiesfontein. I wondered, on that visit, if olive trees would grow wherever she had once lived.
Olive (Schreiner) has always been a part of my own Karoo journey, and now olives are too. On that visit to Richmond, in the garden alongside our guest cottage, were two olive trees taller than the house. I marvelled at their height and at how, despite their resolute strength, they retained an elegant beauty and effortless grace.
Returning to Cradock, I found a Mission olive at our local plant nursery and in the ground it went. The kareeboom I had also bought was a little taller than the olive, and I planted it a few metres away.
Battle commenced. For two years I watched the fight as each of the trees sparred for ascendancy. The kareeboom was the clear winner, the bookies’ favourite, and given its head start of about half a metre, its lead seemed unassailable. But I was still putting my money on the Mission olive.
Up the kareeboom went, all through 2018, until it neared the height of the house. The olive stood no chance.
The olive tree bided its time. Throughout the winter of 2020, it edged closer and closer to the now-sturdy kareeboom’s highest branch; then, in September, it edged ahead, just a centimetre or two.
Like a champion athlete who had slowly but inexorably edged forward and then found the wind to power past the frontrunner, once the tree had achieved its mission, there was no stopping it. Today, the olive is a good two metres higher, and the kareeboom looks sadly squat by comparison.
One thing the olive had given me, in the January of 2020, was a modest harvest. Ten drupes does not a bottle of olives make, but it was a start and an indication that the tree was in good working order and would deliver. This January-February saw a bigger yield and I was able to harvest about 50 in all, once I’d waited for the slowpokes to catch up.
Friends from KwaZulu-Natal had stayed with us at Easter and had told me how they brine their superb olives, which they do once a year. I committed it all to mind, then spent some time browsing olive lore and the methodology of curing and bottling them.
I ended up using the water-cure method, which is similar to the water-and-salt method. Both of these are quick cures, relatively; all done in three weeks. Other ways take much longer.
They also reassured me that each year the crop would grow and that just one tree could host a great number of olives. My optimistic Aries outlook has me imagining rows and rows of bottled olives in the years to come. Meanwhile, my second Mission olive in the opposite garden is now as tall as the house and that tree isn’t even in play yet.
The curing process may seem daunting but if you consider that all you’re doing is changing the water once a day and refilling it, it’s a cinch.
Then: the fun of choosing your aromatics; I didn’t cut any corners, as you’ll see from my recipe on this page. The best olives I can remember eating were from Selfridges’ food hall during a trip to London in the mid-nineties. Whoever had made them had pulled no punches. There was lemon in there, and garlic, herbs and chilli. Just wonderful.
As I write, my solitary bottle of homemade olives has just arrived back home after a shoot in Louis Pieterse’s photographic studio up the road, preening for the camera. I bottled it on 1 May and have just unscrewed the lid and dipped a teaspoon in.
My mind went straight back to London, circa 1996. Mission: accomplished. But it’s only a practice run for the bumper crop of 2022.