We've now mostly finished pruning the olive trees for this year, which was a larger job than expected, but then again some of them clearly haven't been pruned for many years, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised.
I've ended up with a lot more branches and twigs than I'd anticipated, and while olive wood makes makes THE BEST firewood, the structure of the branches makes it a bloody pain to sort out annoying brashy-tangle from from decent kindling and what I call stage 2 firewood, or second kindling (stage 3 being smaller logs and stage 4 bloody great logs which burn for over an hour a pop!).
Anyway, 40 pruned trees means 40 loads of prunings to clear up - a task which I started yesterday, and here's what I ended up with from what I'd say are two pretty average trees (some others have less than this, some more, in about equal measure).....
Piles of kindling and stage 2 firewood (stage 2 really equals second stage kindling)...
Annoying brashy tangle, most of which is thinner than the thinnest in the above picture:
NB - technically, of course ALL of the above will be decent kindling, probably in just a few months, but honestly, I also have pine cones, and all I need to get a fire going is one of those and a handful of the smallest kindling I've cut from yesterday - the pile above is several weeks worth of kindling alone, and thus not really worth my processing further.
So I'm going to just leave all of this here for now, and I'll have a crack to see if I can find people who want this stuff who can store it safely, I'd rather not burn it, this really is top quality kindling, but if I can't get it off the land, I'd rather not leave said kindling out in the open during fire season!
Two trees down, looks much cleaner and ready for strimmming the grass in a couple of weeks time once the rains come, which are finally forecast for a few days next week!
Two trees's worth of olive prunings cleared, 38 to go!