SUSTAINABLE FARMING

We have a 'no dig' policy so do not till the soil between our trees. We leave the grass to grow as long as possible before strimming to encourage bees and other insects. We strim only a couple of times a year for the same reason.

For fertiliser we only use organic manure pellets. We have a longer term plan to have our own donkeys and horses to fertilise with only our own matured manure.

Olives also have another pest which is a moth. Again, we preventatively spray with a natural bacteria that occurs in the soil, bacillus thuringiensis, to prevent them from attacking our trees.

We mulch the small prunings from our trees and leave them to rot in the soil. This increases the organic material in our soil, which our soil tests show is exeptionally high, and also helps the soil retain moisture.

Our olives are milled less than 10km from our groves and, after having been harvested using battery powered harvesters, are transported in our LPG powered truck to the mill and back to us.

We don't irrigate our olives. The most we do in years of severe drought is we will water them to save them from stress. The only other water we use is for spraying the trees with Kaolin to protect them from the olive fly.

To protect from the olive fly we spray preventatively with water and Kaolin which is a natural clay. This works by changing the colour of the actual tree so the flies can't recognise it. 

The large prunings from our trees we burn at home in our wood stoves which we use for heating and cooking in the winter, literally nothing goes to waste. We use hand or battery powered tools.

All of our packaging is recycled, including the labels on our bottles. We take back and reuse your empty bottles. What's more we'll give you a €1 discount on your next bottle for every bottle you return to us.

The waste olive stones, known as sansa, are dried and bagged less than 10km from the mill and then sold as a bio fuel to power stoves, heaters and boilers.