Olive trees Cangarela – Košutići

A little over 20 years ago, in the spring of 2004, we planted our first olive trees. We plowed the meadow under our new house, dug holes, planted olive trees and started taking care of them.

We started with our first 30 olives. The varieties they recommended to us were lecchino and pendolino, and it turned out that it wasn’t a bad choice at all.

We didn’t know much about olives. Considering my profession as a food technologist and experience working with edible oils, we knew much more about oils, but we were also aware that there was still a long way to go. We tried to learn, learn from literature, learn from more experienced olive growers and learn from practice. It turned out to be the right way.

After several years, we had the opportunity to buy a neglected vineyard in the middle of which stood two ancient olive trees. Those olives were the best proof that olives grow and thrive there. We planted nearly 200 olive trees there, the largest part of which is the Istrian autochthonous variety, the Istrian white.

We are expanding our olive groves even today. We planted large areas of olive trees on the hillside below our house. Today we reached 430 olives. In the meantime, we decided to give more space to Istrian autochthonous varieties, we planted a larger number of puntoza and especially rosinjola olives.

This is especially because we found that the old olive trees in our village of Košutići and the surrounding area were all Rosinjola varieties. These old olives show a certain variety of characteristics, but they are undeniably rosinjolas. Most of the new ones are still very young, they are far from the first harvest, but they are growing and getting bigger every year. Finally, an old Istrian saying says – You didn’t plant an olive tree for yourself, you planted it for your grandchildren.

Our olive groves in Košutići near Višnjan are located at an altitude of about 180 m, most of them face the southwest and the sea.