Carob harvesting: it won't make you rich

Over the past few weeks we have been harvesting carobs.

It's not like skipping down to the orchard, plucking a few bright apples in the autumn sunshine and spending the evening making crumble.

A carob tree is a tough beast - it survives in poor soil with little water, and its fruit are hard, brown, shiny pods which which cling tightly to the branches.

To harvest the carob (garrofer in Catalan) - even though it's 28 degrees in the shade, you put on your trainers, long trousers and gloves. A hard hat wouldn't go amiss either.

Then you clamber down the terraces, over walls, around (or through) thorny bushes to the tree that you think will most readily relinquish its hoard. If you're feeling particularly organised, you'll tidy up underneath the tree, pulling out suckers, cutting back brambles and moving rocks. If you've got a smallish boy available, you send him up the tree with a big stick to knock off as many carobs as he can so the rest of you can rummage around in the undergrowth picking up the falling fruits and trying not to get hit on the head too much, because it hurts, and hoping you don't frighten any snakes or scorpions.

After many, many hours of hot, hard work, we (well, mainly David) had filled 20 sacks with the smelly dark pods. We filled up the trailer and drove down the hill to sell our produce to one of the many carob dealers in the village.

Lots of carobs: one day one of them might be in your yogurt

The weighbridge confirmed that we'd picked 240kg. We unloaded our harvest onto the giant pile outside the dealer and received 20 cents a kilo in return - a grand total of 48 euros. Like I said, it isn't going to make us rich.

Just a small addition to Spain's 65,000 tonne carob output

Carob farming can be fun

However, there are some interesting carob facts. (NB I've been a very lazy journalist and gleaned some of these facts from the internet. Although I've done a lot of triangulation to check the info rather than simply copying Wikipedia, I've not found the world's greatest carob expert and telephoned them to check the facts. If you are the world's greatest carob expert, please let me know.)

1) The Latin name for carob is ceratonia siliqua. Gold and gemstones were once weighed against carob seeds because people - mistakenly it seems - believed that carob seeds were uniform in weight. A one-carat diamond is 200 milligrams. Today, the carat indicates the purity of gold rather than its weight because a pure gold Roman coin, the solidus, weighed 24 carats, and therefore 24-carat gold is 100 per cent pure.

2) If you're German, you call the carob johannisbrotbaum. This is because St John the Baptist ate carobs when he was in the desert.

3) Spain is the world's top carob-producing country. Wikipedia says that it produced 65,000 tonnes in 2009.

4) The carob dealer man told us that the husks of the carobs that we picked are going to become feed for livestock.

5) And the seeds of the carobs that we picked are going to be sold to multinational companies to make the food additive E410 (known as locust bean gum or carob gum), which is used to thicken yogurts and other foods.

6) Carob is used to make vegan chocolate. But a raw carob does not look, taste, feel or smell anything like chocolate. Better to stick to real chocolate in my opinion.

7) Somewhere on the internet it claims that carobs are fire resistant. If this is true, it would be a very good thing as they grow where there are lots of forest fires.

8) Robert Byron said - rather unpoetically - that a carob tastes 'like a glucose doormat'.