Olive harvest

With a little delay, here come the impressions of our first olive harvest. The last few weeks have been so jam-packed - quite literally with our moving boxes - with unpacking, setting up and finally arriving at the house that I simply haven't had the time to write. But that also means that there will soon be the first pictures of our interior :)! But for now, the story of the hard-working olive growers...

We started on 13 October - first with the olives, which are the best for eating.

We carefully, almost reverently plucked them from the trees, sorted them by hand - I felt like Cinderella, the good ones in the pot, the bad ones in the jar, except that no pigeons helped me - and after three days we had a considerable number of filled glasses, which now had to be diligently watered every day for the next few weeks so that their bitter substances could be flushed out.

The first of these, the ones that have been cut or beaten - i.e. hit once with a stone so that they burst open - have already been soaked in brine and are waiting in the cellar until they are ready to eat, which will hopefully be in about a week's time. However, we have left most of them intact as they will keep for longer but they will need a few more days of soaking.

On the 20th of October, we got down there in earnest! 30 olive trees with black fruit were waiting for us and at seven in the morning Xeni arrived with his brother-in-law Nasi, his sister-in-law Ela and their little daughter Sara.

As we had never harvested olives before, we copied what Xeni and his family did - and went on with the traditional, archaic way - plucking by hand again and beating the ones you can't reach a little and carefully and picking up all of them from the ground.

The six of us managed two and a half trees - admittedly particularly large ones that were full of olives - by 15:00.

Then we went to the mill, proud like hell with our 5 sacks and

190kg then lay in the green basin waiting to be pressed...

... the first thing we noticed was that our olives, unlike all the others that were also waiting in green basins, were really clean. No twigs, no leaves, because we had picked them all out neatly - and, as we now learnt, completely unnecessarily - because the first wash cycle in the mill does this work for us.

And when Elmar asked the mill operator whether our result was adequate for one day, we received a pitying smile in the style of: ‘Well, I don't know what you've been doing all day.’

But to be honest, we had already had the impression that we were doing something wrong. At this rate, it would take us another 10 days to harvest the olives. And then the long journey to the mill each time, as they shouldn't be stored for more than two days in order to achieve the best possible quality.

Not to mention the labour wages for our harvest workers... we could soon weigh our olive oil in gold...

So we had a look around at our neighbours to see how they do it and the next harvest day we had olive combs and large nets with us.

With almost one tonne of olives, we arrived at the mill two days later and had harvested 24 trees in two working days!

The reward: around 150 litres of excellent quality olive oil, which is now stored in our cellar :))))

But it's not just the result that fills us with joy. Harvesting the olives is - in my opinion - a very sensual experience: the way the shiny black fruits feel in your hand, their smell, in which you can already smell the first nuances of oil, the hard physical work that makes you fall into bed in the evening - exhausted but also very satisfied - the rattling of the harvest sticks, which comes not only from us but also from the surrounding neighbours - because they were all doing exactly the same as we did on those days...

And next weekend it will be the turn of the green olives - fortunately not 30 but only about 12 trees this time. Then that's it - for this year. The olives will go into ‘hibernation’, will be pruned in January and then we'll see if they give us an equally rich harvest next year.