On Sunday the 26th August 2017 I remember waking up in bed, rolling over, and seeing Ben scrolling on his phone in deep interest. The first thing he said was "I've found an olive grove on gumtree, I think we should buy it".
To back things up a bit, Ben and I have always loved olive trees, particularly super old school gnarly looking ones with big shaggy leaves filled with olives, and knots and knobs on their trunks (which means they're old and established). We always dreamed of having our own olive grove filled with big old olive trees and being able to make our own olive oil, but were two very impatient people.
We looked into purchasing 15 year old trees... only to discover they cost around $1500 each, our instant established olive grove dream was popped with a pin instantly. We needed around 100 trees to fill our front paddock, meaning it would cost us $150,000 for the trees alone, before we even started on the soil, water, feed etc. It was a pipe dream, so we decided we would have to resort to planting young trees and wait for them to grow. That was until Ben found this gumtree add.
The add was listed by a young couple out in Kyenton, around 2.5 hours away from us. They had just purchased a property that had an established olive grove on it, only they didn't want the trees.
The girl had horses and she wanted to use the paddocks for them, so they decided to list the trees in hope they would find someone that would be crazy enough to transplant a fully grown olive grove. Well they did, they found us!!
That morning we loaded Heatho into the car and set off on a drive up to Kyenton to check the trees out and make sure they were what we were looking for. When we pulled up all we could see were these massiveeeeeee olive trees FILLED with olives ready for harvest. We had a chat with the couple and asked how much they wanted for each of the trees... they responded $500 per tree.. thats around a saving of $1000 per tree. BUT, Ben works in construction and has a-lot of equipment, part of what he does for a living is to remove trees. Ben knew what it would cost them to have the trees removed from their property... he also knew they needed to find someone bat shit crazy enough to want to transplant a whole olive grove. To transplant something like this, you need a-lot of machinery, man power, and ideally access to it for free or it would cost you a fair bit to hire all of the trucks, diggers etc to be able to pull off something like this. The chances of them finding anyone else in the position we were in was slim to none. So instead, Ben responded with an offer of $1000 for the entire grove ($10 per tree.... $1490 saving per tree.... $149,000 savings total) - with the deal that we would reinstate their paddocks once we were done.... they said yes. (HOLY SHITBALLS). We shook hands, jumped in the car and planned to head back the following weekend with an army of machinery, trucks and family who knew how to drive it.
All up it took us 3 full weekends. We used 3 trucks, 2 machines and 5 people. It was BLOODY HARD WORK. Everyday we would wake up at 4am, do the 2.5 hour drive up the Kyenton, dig up and transplant as many of the trees as we could and load them into the truck, tie them all down and then start the 2.5 hour drive back to the farm. Bens sister Eloise and her partner at the time helped us everyday and we are forever in debt. Eloise only got her truck licence the week before we started this, so not only was her first truck drive 2.5hours long... she also had to navigate the freeways with 10 gigantic olive trees sticking out the side of her tray.
Transplanting trees this big was obviously a big task, we had to cut them back fairly hard to make sure we could fit them into the trucks, and also to make sure they didnt die of shock once we put them in the ground on the other end. Only now almost 3 years later are we finally starting to see some olives growing, we have our fingers crossed for our first small harvest this year. Our grove is a mix between Manzanillo olives and Corregiola olives.
This whole process was absolutely exhausting, but I think I was running on adrenaline, I was so excited and so happy to be physically doing work that would get us a step closer to what Laycock Farm looks like in my head in 10 years time. Its the same feeling I have right now knowing were starting our veggie patch this weekend. Its a hard feeling to describe. I feel sick with excitement, I guess is the only way to put it.
I sometimes look back on these photos and wondered how the hell we actually pulled this off. We managed to transplant an entire orchard to our property and not kill each-other in the process. We also havent killed one single tree to date, cheers to that. I look forward to the day I have crates filled with Laycock Farm olive oil to give to my family and friends, and to sell at our little local market.
L xx
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