The simplest rule: match intensity, then play with contrast. A mild, milky cheese wants a gentle, buttery olive that will not bully it, while a big, salty, aged cheese can stand up to a punchy, briny one. Get that balance right and you have the backbone of any good board. Everything below is just refining that instinct: a buttery Castelvetrano…
Read the story →A cold hardy olive tree still has limits. How cold olives can really go, which varieties hold up best, what zones work and how…
October 28, 2026Are olive trees toxic to cats or dogs? The tree is not a known pet poison, but pits, fallen fruit, garden chemicals and pollen can be. What to watch for.
October 25, 2026Types of olive trees compared for home growers: size, cold tolerance, self-fertility and fruit use for Arbequina, Mission, Koroneiki and six more.
October 22, 2026Straight off the tree, an olive is inedible — bitter enough to make you wince. Curing is how we fix that, and you can do it at home…
Kalamata are ripened and brine-cured. Tinned black olives are picked green and oxidised. Why one tastes of wine and the other of almost nothing.
An olive that is delicious from the jar can wreck a dish, because heat does three things to it: it drives out salt, it softens the flesh, and…
In a village in Crete stands an olive tree up to 4,000 years old — still making olives. A timeline of everything it has outlived, and the one…
Australia built a modern olive oil industry from scratch in a few decades. The Murray valley plantations, the freshness advantage,…
Four ways to cure olives at home — water, brine, lye and dry salt — with the timings, the safety…
Spain once ran the world's only olive oil futures exchange, in Jaén. It never found the liquidity it needed, and…
The olive reached California with Spanish missionaries, survived a century of false starts, invented an entirely American style of black…
A raw olive is inedible. Everything you taste in a table olive — texture, colour, saltiness, sharpness — was decided…
Quand un comté californien rogne discrètement les taxes de voirie d'un producteur, il soutient une mutation plus vaste : la survie…
Its beauty, its origins, its history: the varieties, the fields, the pictures.
“What does lavender have to do with olives? Well, I’m glad you asked. I just love both, and to me they’re the perfect match.”
