Enter: Team Olive

By Jess Chamberlain, Sunset home writer

Ever moved into a new-to-you residence and realized after a couple years that you have some knock-out blossoming shrubs in the corner of your lot that’d you’d never noticed before?

Well, last week Sunset’s landscape supervisor Rick LaFrentz took One Block Feast‘s Team Olive on a little field trip around Sunset’s campus introducing us to the 21 (yes, twenty-one) fruit-bearing olive trees on the property.

As some of us shook our heads in bewilderment, shamefully realizing we don’t get up from our desks enough (how had we not appreciated these gigantic landmarks before?), team member (Sunset associate art director) Keith Whitney noted, “21….Almost a football game.” Indeed. We there committed ourselves to getting to know this seemingly under-appreciated food source on the property where we spend 5 days of our week. 

For our part in the local feast Team Olive will be making olive oil and curing olives from the goods in our own front yard.

Over the next couple months, as we watch and wait for our baby olives to grow (admittedly not quite as cute and cuddly as Team Chicken‘s subjects, but we did leave our field trip unscratched), we’ll be updating you on our olive research and observations prior to our anticipated harvest October/November-ish.

First tackle: DNA testing our subjects to identify exactly what type of olives we’re dealing with. Yep, we’ll be sending in sample cuttings for analysis. Expect nothing short of CSI amazement.

Until then, please share any olive knowledge, wisdom, or intrigue.

And we’re taking name suggestions for our all-star team line-up of olive trees.