There is a discipline to dry-farming that has nothing to do with technique. It is the discipline of restraint — of trusting the winter rains that are already three months gone.
There is a discipline to dry-farming that has nothing to do with technique. It is the discipline of restraint — of trusting the winter rains that are already three months gone, of believing that the roots have found what they need in the deep limestone beneath our feet, of resisting the impulse to intervene. The hardest farming is the farming you do not do.
July in Avdelero is merciless. The Larnaca sun does not ask permission. By ten in the morning the grove is a shimmer of heat and the cicadas are so loud you have to raise your voice to be heard. The trees, for their part, are quiet. They have been doing this for centuries. They know how to wait.
We walk the grove every morning during summer — not to do anything, but to look. To read the leaves for signs of stress, to note which trees are carrying the most fruit, to watch the slow deepening of green as the olives fill. It is the closest thing we have to a conversation with the grove. We ask; it answers in a language of increments.
What we are really doing, I think, is practising trust. Every dry summer is a wager — on the depth of the roots, on the memory of the winter rains, on the intelligence of a tree that has lived longer than anyone in our family. We have not lost that wager yet. We do not intend to start now.