<table border=0 cellpadding=2 cellspacing="0"><tr><td>
<pre>Sharn,

Thanks for that interesting piece of information. We also experienced heavy
winds during the inflorescence period and I suspect that this was
detrimental to fruit set. We irrigate all our olives so I would have thought
that the biannual fruiting effect would be mitigated somewhat.

We had hoped to run an Olive Harvest Festival in May but on closer
inspection of our trees we realise that our yield this year will be rather
small. We have yet to fire up our recently purchased Olimio 100 olive press
and so we felt that there would be a lot of trial and error before getting
the oil to acceptable quality. We also thought that there would be a fair
amount of olive oil wasted in the process - those olives for trial and error
we do not have!

Peter Caird of Victorian Olives (this is not a plug Peter) wrote an article
for Olives Australia about his early struggles with his machine and it makes
worthwhile reading for newcomers to olive oil pressing. He may be persuaded
to reprint his article for the discussion group?

Regards,

Phil Bramley
</pre>
</td></tr></table>