Why growing olive trees in Andalucia adds purpose to my life

There are moments in everyone’s life, no matter how industrious and productive that life might be – I doubt even beavers are immune – when a certain futility creeps in. It happens most clamourously in late midlife when the daily round loses some of its sparkle and vim, when the engine requires a bit more cranking of a morning. And it’s in these moments that my mind turns to planting trees. Confucius apparently once said (though the attributions for this are legion) that “no man’s life is wasted who has planted a tree”. A sentiment with which I can only concur.

In my neck of the woods, on a mountain farm, high up in the Andalucian Sierra Nevada, nestling in the intersections between two rivers, the obvious tree to plant is the olive.

I have the good fortune to live among a host of my own olives – “my own”, I have the temerity to suggest, for who can truly “own” a tree?

But like so many of my neighbours, and the Berbers, Romans and Phoenicians that cultivated this land before us, I quickly fell beneath the ancient spell of the olive, with its silvery-grey leaves, gnarled trunk, and subtle, versatile fruit.

Why, after 30 years, I am largely composed of the stuff… assuming I eat a kilo of olives a week, that’s 50 kilos a year, which comes to a ton and a half. And of that blessèd golden oil, well, more like two litres a week makes for three tons.

So whenever I feel that need to add purpose to my life, I throw myself into planting. Here’s how it’s done.

The operation is best conducted as the new year rolls around and everybody is out on the hills picking or pruning their olives, for of course we are surrounded by olive farms and their incumbents. You decide upon the variety you want, in our case picual, which does well in these parts (the Alpujarra in the province of Granada since you ask), produces a richly flavoured oil and is easy to get off the tree, unlike some. The manzanilla, for example, which has wonderful qualities but hangs on to its tree like a dog to a bone.

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From the cut boughs you look for lively silver-grey wood from the year before, about the thickness of a good aubergine. This, you cut into 6in lengths. You will already have found a good source of growing medium, or soil. Here, the rivers bring us heaps of rich alluvial silt with a lot of sand in it; you can’t ask for better than that. Next, you bury each of your estacas or cuttings in the soil in a plastic bag, leaving enough room at the top to accommodate the water. Find somewhere with sun and shade to keep them, and then start watering. A thorough drenching at first and then a good damping every couple of days. They must not become waterlogged or dry out; this is just a matter of fine judgment.

Day after day through the spring and early summer months, you go down to water your bags of mud with hope in your heart. As time goes on, this hope starts to dissipate; day after week after month with nothing but a few nettles, chickweed or fat hen whittles away even the most fervent enthusiasm.

Then one day, on the verge of giving the whole project up as a bad job, you trudge down and there, in one of the bags, unmistakable in its robust “oliveness”, is a tiny leaf bursting through the soil. This is, of course, one of those sublime moments and your heart sings with joy; you are one of God’s gardeners and you’ve got something right. It has probably been about three long months, 90 days and more of dwindling hope. You water thoroughly and carefully, and little by little over the ensuing days there comes a new sprout in bag after bag – and by now the first one is a tiny sapling with half a dozen leaves bursting upwards to gather the sunlight. Soon you have a little forest of fresh, slender saplings.

This is about the time that the sheep get involved. One day the flock passes those hitherto uninteresting bags and one of them wanders over to see if anything noteworthy is happening. She cries with delight at her discovery. (Sheep do this; it’s one of their likeable qualities. Instead of silently hoovering up whatever dainty morsel they might have encountered, say a bucket of figs or apricots on the turn, they will baa a complex baa that says “oh joy, look what I’ve found, a whole heap of figs” – if there’s one thing that has it over the olive for a sheep, it’s a fig – whereupon the whole flock gallops over to share in the windfall. Of course, as is so often the case, there is a useful mechanism in this admirable if involuntary generosity: figs give sheep the s----, but only if they eat too many.)

In a matter of about a minute and a half, there is not a single sapling to be seen, and the flock has wandered off in search of more excitement.

There’s not a stitch left; they eat the leaves and the tender green sticks. It’s back to the bag of mud.

It’s not till the next morning that you discover this. A heaviness descends upon you. It has happened before and it’ll happen again.

You had planned to put a fence around your beloved little olive trees but, as with so many other things, you just hadn’t quite got around to it. But you are made of the sternest stuff; you start watering once more in the faint hope that they may shoot again. You don’t need to put the fence up right now; it’s just bags of mud, nothing to arouse the cupidity of the sheep.

It takes about 10 days for the new shoots to appear. Once again, the heart sings, but this time you know better than to be complacent. Over the next couple of days, you gather together the odds and ends needed to create little wire fences around each of the new shoots. As you lug these down to the terrace, a familiar sound catches your ear. A complex and excitable baa rings out from the edge of the field, muffled slightly by the sound of the flock racing as one towards it.

Then silence, broken by a slightly different register of baaing; one that sounds appreciative, happy, satiated.

Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Andalucia, the 25th birthday edition, by Chris Stewart, is out now (Sort of Books, £9.99 paperback).

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