2025 harvest notes

The 2025 season got underway in April with the usual round of pruning and the first buds beginning to show on the trees. By early June the grove was covered in small white blossoms, and not long after that the first olives started forming. Through the summer they slowly grew while the hillside baked in its normal mix of sun, fog, and wind coming over the ridge.

One new experiment this year was tagging every tree with a QR code. Each tree now has a little tag tied to a branch that links to a map of the orchard. The idea is to start tracking things like pruning, fruit production, and yield tree by tree. Realistically it mostly just gives me an excuse to walk around the grove scanning trees with my phone.

The olives started turning purple in early October, and by November it was clearly going to be a big year.

Harvest ended up happening in two rounds, about a month apart. The first was on November 20 with a crew of about eight people. There was so much fruit that we actually had to stop early after completely filling the truck. The olives were immediately driven up to Oleascape in Sonoma, where Frederic pressed them the next day.

We came back for round two on December 16 to finish the rest of the orchard. Each harvest produced about 9–10 gallons of oil, which made 2025 the largest harvest yet. Overall the orchard had 34 trees with heavy fruit, and yielded 914 pounds of olives!

After milling, the oil rested in stainless steel ‘fusti’ tanks and was racked (removing particulates from the bottom before bottling in February. The label also got updated this year to better match regulatory requirements as the grove slowly inches toward becoming a real business.

Goal for 2026: sell one bottle of Skyline Grove olive oil to someone I don’t already know! So many things to do to hit this milestone…