In Greece Before the Olive Trees Fill Out

All of those trees are olives and they appear to be near-death at this time but all of them are highly-productive olive trees.

It's the wildest thing at harvest time as they get machines to shake all hell out of the trees and the olives fall into some collection mechanism.  All those olives are then bundled off to smaller-scale processing plants with six to twelve men running them and they turn the olives into olive oil.  It seems every Greek everywhere has access to olive trees or grows them at home and personal bottling of olive oil is one of the family things.  If they like you and give you some of the family olive oil, this is the best of juju.  They would give it away in two-liter bottles and there's never a shortage of olive oil in Greece.

People lament the disappearance of honeybees and it's true where it's happening but there were bees all over the place here and not the big ones but real honeybees.  It wasn't too hard to find beehives in the area so there was quite a bit of individual effort to keep them alive and ready to come to their olive trees.

That's the basis of the speculation on Greek honey and why there's something special about it.  Maybe since much of the pollen the bees gather is from olive trees, it imparts a different taste nuance to the honey.


The scene is Harry's backyard and it's more like a pasture than a garden but that's as healthy as such land can ever get and the bugs love it.  The pasture served more than one purpose since Harry knew all the plants and knew which ones were good for salads.  Pastures aren't just for looking, they're also for eating, it seems.


Here's some major science on the metagenome of teaspoon of Kansas soil.  There's hard science behind it but the general thinking is toward the holism of the American Indians in which everything is a part of everything else.  The metagenome is the view of the individual genomes of all the microbes, roughly one hundred thousand, in the soil and then reviewing the relationships between them.  (Science Daily: Teasing out the microbiome of the Kansas prairie)

We strongly suspect they will find feedback suppression loops with these organisms within the microbiome (i.e. the teaspoon of soil).  There are many microbes living in symbiosis inside our bodies and we suspect the obvious wheat plant may actually have a physical body which is much larger than it seems and it works in the same kind of symbiosis as within the human body.

(Ed:  that's sci-fi!)

We shall see about that, won't we.


Or just kick back and enjoy the olive trees as the Mediterranean Sea is less than a kilometer away so everything is so fresh and clean.  So near the Sea, there is always a breeze and you can probably feel it is warm just by looking at it.