What it means to be a keeper
Last year, everything we earned from the oil went back into the land. This year we are making that arrangement explicit, and giving it a name.
The Keepers Membership is simple: you buy a year of organic olive oil ahead of the harvest, and that money goes into the grove, planting, soil, water, the slow work that does not pay for itself in a single season. You get the oil as it comes, four times through the year, and the herbs that grow alongside it.
What it pays for
Most olive groves in Sicily are monocultures: rows of one tree, bare soil between them, everything else cleared away. Ours was too. We are planting herbs, flowers and other trees between and beneath the olives, so that what grows here becomes a system rather than a crop.
That is also what is in the box. The herbs that come with your organic olive oil are not a gift shop addition, they are the grove itself, the things we planted for the pollinators and the soil, which turn out to be worth picking and sending.
What last year's oil payed for
A plan. We brought in Marc Leiber, who has spent years developing syntropic agroforestry systems in a Mediterranean climate at Quinta das Abelhas in Portugal. Working out what to plant, and where, and in what order, is not something we could have guessed our way through.
A thousand plants, bought and put in the ground.
Irrigation for those plants, so that they survive their first summers.
Seeds and sowing cover crops between the trees.
None of this produces oil. It produces the conditions for oil, ten and twenty years from now.
What comes next
The next planting is mostly hedges, and more of what goes between the rows: aromatic herbs, and a few larger trees where there is room for them.
Hedges do a lot of quiet work — they break the wind, hold soil on a slope, and give insects and birds somewhere to live that isn't an olive tree. They are also, simply, beautiful. A grove with hedges looks like a place someone tends rather than a field someone farms. The herbs between the rows do the same work lower down: cover for the soil, flowers for the pollinators, and, in the right season, something worth putting in a box.
We will see how much of it takes. Sicilian summers are not kind to young plants, and some of what we put in last year did not make it. That is part of finding out what works.
Why pouches, not bottles
Extra virgin olive oil does not improve with age. Its polyphenols decline from the day it is milled, faster in the presence of light, heat and oxygen. A litre of oil that sits open on a kitchen counter for six months is not the same oil that left the mill.
So we send small quantities, often. Your first box brings the bottle, dark glass, meant to stay in your kitchen for years. After that come refill pouches: 500 ml at a time, sealed until you open them, each one filling the bottle you already have.
The pouches are lighter than glass, take less energy to make, and travel with a fraction of the freight. But the real reason is what is inside them. You get oil that is closer to fresh, for longer into the year.