It’s Friday!  Enjoy some tidbits of the everyday things going on in our lives here at Coldani Olive Ranch.

I planted a six inch seedling the day my wife Julie and I got married ~ 9/16/2006 ~  Quite frankly; as an olive tree farmer the tree looks a little pathetic because it has been restricted in this pot but we also received the beautiful pot as a wedding gift and I wanted to be able to take the tree with us if we moved so don’t pass judgment on my farming skills from the looks of it!  I like to think it’s an antonym for our marriage.

June 8^th 2012 will be our first ever pick up party for our olive oil Club Members.  We will be holding it at Abundance winery in Lodi.  More notice will go out but it should be a great time with oil tastings/pairings, a band and a complimentary glass of wine.  If you are a club member and in the area swing by and grab your shipment and enjoy the evening with us.

Get your Allegra or Zyrtec ready.  Working in these groves while the trees are in bloom is messy work and will cause a fit on your allergies even with a dust mask.  Olive pollen is very fine and can even travel miles away in gusty winds.

Look for our new sign on the side of a semi truck.  Currently parked on our oldest block of trees off Interstate 5 and HWY 12.  This is the second one; the first truck had been stolen in the night after it sat for about three days.  WHO steals an entire semi truck trailer!?  Who would have thought that I would have to pull off decent tires from this trailer and install bald ones trying everything to keep this one from being tempting?

This is a mission olive tree I planted for aesthetics in my front yard.  Nearly every day there is a cat using it as a scratching post and I have seen at least three or four different cats on this tree.  I’d like to think that someday when this tree gets to be 100 years old there will be an interesting visual story around the base of it.

They’re here!  Calivirgin needed more hands so my sister Gina and her husband Scott moved from the always sunny and mild weather of San Diego back to Lodi to work with the company full time.  At least it wasn’t like they were moving to Alaska.   I think last I checked we have been picked up by 33 different retail stores since January first of this year so cracking the whip seems to be working.

There are many different uses for olive oil.  I could make an entire blog post on them alone and I just may do that but one that we have been receiving many comments on is the use of our lemon olive oil as a makeup remover.  It works! Plus it leaves your skin moisturized with a light fragrant smell of lemons.  Try it sometime!

I saved my favorite photo for last.  At first I thought a twenty pound gopher or ground squirrel had finally done us in.  Our irrigation nemesis jumped out of this hole.  A mother coyote and eleven, YES ELEVEN!  pups scattered in all directions from this den which was dug right in the middle of one of our rows of trees and about in the middle of the entire grove.  Coyotes are a real problem, they chew on our drip irrigation nightly to the point that we will not fix the drip lines until the night before we water otherwise we will just have to fix it twice.  They like the drip lines as a source of water but there is also evidence that the just chew on them as a chew toy.  Coyotes easily cost us in the thousands every year in repair parts & labor.

Happy Friday, Mike Coldani