Its not as regular as clockwork, but pretty reliable. Plus or minus two days from November 21, our olive trees are at their flowering peak.

Not this year, the time has come and gone and we've not seen a single flower. No flowers, no olives, no oil 2025.

Its not just late. In nearby Buckland Valley I was looking at another olive grove.

Like us, last year they lost their crop because of lace bug. I keep in touch, and rang to let them know we had found lace bug and sprayed, and offered to come and check their trees for them.

I did find some small pockets. Not lots but more than one generation, which means there might be more eggs and therefore later hatchings. But in looking at the trees I noticed one single tree in full blossom. None of the other hundreds of trees had a single flower, just this one small tree on the middle of the plantation.

So, clearly the time was still right, just that the trees were, like ours, opting to do something else with their time. Like regrowing, recovering. Not putting out flowers for a new crop.

I came back home and rechecked our trees. No, not a single tree with any flowers.

I spoke to another grower in Happy Valley. Same thing. His trees are recovering, and starting to look ok, but no blossom. The prospects for local olive oil in north east Victoria for the next 12 months are pretty grim....

Trees in April. All dead sticks, no leaves. Very depressing!

A lot of bright new growth on the trees, December. In the nearest tree, the red circle highlights the lowest+furthest branch, which is where you find the new hatched lace bug.

At our place the trees do look good, with mostly new growth. The harshly pruned trees have thick new growth. The unpruned ones have a lot of dead twigs amongst the vivid green new growth. Next harvest there will be a lot of twigs in the catch which is a pain for everyone. The twigs add weight without oil, so the yield per field bin is reduced. The twigs clutter the crushing process and add to the workload of the processing guys. We pay for the processing per ton, so added weight with no oil increases the per litre cost of the finished oil.

The lace bug outbreak in north east Victoria was so bad that the excess insects moved into other trees. Near our front door is an ancient Ash tree. Its gigantic....more than 15 metres high, massive spreading canopy and fantastic shade. That tree lost all its leaves in less than a week, and in the aftermath some quite big branches have died. In amongst this year's new growth are large chunks of dead wood, and we've already had a few big branches come down.

So, at this stage we will have no oil again, for another year.

When we sprayed in October, I didn't include the bottom paddock. Those trees were hit hard, most lost their leaves, so there was little cover for any lace bug to overwinter. When I was checking for lace bug in Spring I found none in that paddock, so we didn't spray.

Last week I found some. Small pockets, but in more than one tree. I have been round and spot-sprayed these.

Its just me. I won't get them all, so I will have to do it again this week and make sure there are none left.