March 2020
This is my first newsletter as your new chairman so it will be learning experience for me in understanding the requirements and the role and all the help I can get from the members will [...]
January 2020
Happy New Year to everyone. I hope you have all managed to take some time off from grove work and enjoyed family and friends. John and I are slowly but surely dragging ourselves outside and [...]
September 2019
AND THE AWARD GOES TO... Congratulations to this year’s winner - Best in Show winner ‘Duck Creek’ Warkworth, for their J5 and Frantoio, medium blend, olive oil. Derek and Sally Holland moved to their grove [...]
June 2019
WELL, HASN’T THAT BEEN A CONFUSING HARVEST! From green olives with little colour (particularly little or no yellow) producing 16 – 20+% yield and in the neighbours grove very few green fruit but with masses [...]
March 2019
Suddenly thoughts of Summer have almost gone as the preparations for our harvests get into full swing – simple things like checking that the rats haven't got into the picking nets and got hungry, have [...]
February 2019
I am typing this accompanied by the gentle pitter patter of steady RAIN on the roof, in fact I have been hearing the sound off and on since we returned last night (Saturday) from 3 [...]
October 2018
Winter is well and truly gone and the buds are heavy on the trees but still very few flowers showing yet in the Bay of Islands area and further North. Which brings me to the [...]
July 2018
Hopefully, by now you will all have liters of fabulous oil in your bottles and fustis and some even in your clients’ pantry. Generally, everyone seems to have had a really good season although the [...]
May 2018
As you will be aware a new committee was elected at the last AGM and suddenly my inbox is full of emails! Balancing tending to those, and picking over 2 tonnes of olives by hand [...]
March 2018
The 2018 harvest brings great hope. The strangest of summers have seen high temperatures and they are continuing into late March but intermittent high volumes of precipitation. The effects so far seem to be large [...]