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The olives have set.
You will have read the short version in our email. Here is the fuller picture, with photographs from the groves this month.
Every tree carried its flowering through to fruit, and the olives are on the branches now, small and green, the pit inside only just beginning to form. This is the quiet window that decides everything, the weeks when the tree lays its polyphenols down in the fruit. Production looks strong across every grove.
Holding the balance
With the fruit set, the work is now protection. The threat is the olive fruit fly, and a single generation left unchecked can take a real share of a harvest. Most growers reach for pesticides. We spray zeolite instead, a food-grade mineral that films over the fruit and confuses the fly, and shades the leaves like a sunscreen against the building heat. It costs more, and it washes off in rain, so it has to be reapplied. A pesticide does not choose its targets. It takes the olive fly and the lacewing and the bee alike, and most of the insects in our groves are working for us.
The ground, and the fire watch
This is where most of the hours went this past month, and none of it shows up in the lab report.
Our plots are extensive, not intensive. No tilling, and on most of them no machines at all, since the slopes are too steep for a tractor. The ground cover is left wild, a real mix of aromatics and herbs. This year the wild mallow went feral, well over a meter tall in places, and we seeded clover and vetch among it to feed the soil through their roots.
Normally the sheep do the heavy lifting and graze that cover down. This year they could not. Cyprus is in the middle of a serious foot and mouth outbreak, and sheep and goats are banned from grazing outside, the animals that historically kept the dry grass down across the countryside. After a very wet winter the cover grew thick, then dried out as the heat came on. So we cleared it ourselves, by hand, with strimmers, across every slope. Brutal work, and all of it finished before the summer fire risk truly arrives.
About the 2026 harvest
When the harvest is ready in September, the shop will open with a password. Existing customers from the 2025 harvest will receive their access first, one week before anyone else. After that, the waitlist will receive access in the order people joined.
The 2025 harvest sold out within weeks of opening. The 2026 harvest will be larger, but waitlist priority by sign-up date is the only way we can keep allocation fair.
Know someone who would value this?
Forward this page to them, or share the waitlist link directly:
https://www.highphenolic.com/waitlist
Each name added moves down a queue we cannot grow as fast as demand. So earlier matters.
Click any image below to open the gallery and look through the groves this month.
