Olive toil

The olive harvest is just coming to an end here. Around the start of November we began to glimpse vast dark green collection nets spread out on the hillsides between the silvery olive trees. As we sat outside a bar enjoying a cold beer in the evening, carfulls of tired, dirty people would pass with sacks bulging with the tiny fruits to join the queue for one of the village's olive presses.

Spain is the world's largest olive producer (see Wikipedia) and there are certainly a lot of olive trees around here. In London, olives and their oil were, to us, an expensive delicacy. But here they are trodden underfoot, we can buy big bottles of luscious, yellowy-green oil for not very much money at all, and quite a few people can't even be bothered to pick their crop as they've got too much left over from the year before.

As it's our first year we were keen to carry out a harvest from the trees on our land and get our own olive oil pressed. We've been anxiously watching the fruits grow all year, wondering whether a green olive would turn into a black olive (it did - via purple) and waiting for an indication that the time was right to begin the harvest. (Some magic meteorological moment determines when the olives are at exactly the right stage of oiliness, wateriness and not-greenness.)

Olive blossom in May

Olives ripening in early September

One warm sunny day towards the end of November, when most of our olives were soft and purply-black, and after our immediate neighbours had picked theirs, we decided to begin. David had been watching the neighbours work their harvest and had picked up some good tips and one of our friends arrived to show us what to do. Our land doesn't have huge amounts of olive trees (although it did once: there are enormous holes in the ground where old olive trees were dug out for some reason, possibly to sell), so we had agreed with another neighbour to pick their olives too. To have our own oil pressed at the Moli d'oli in the village we would need a minimum of 300kg.

We started by clearing the land as much as we could underneath the trees. The flatter and cleaner it is, the easier it is to spread out the huge net which will catch the olives. Where there were slopes (most of our land is sloping, in spite of the terraces) we caught the edge of the net on some low branches to stop all the olives rolling off down the hill. (NB, we learned that it's better not to have a small puppy running around at this time because she will charge right underneath the net and it will be rather difficult to extract her from the tangle.)

David demonstrating how to lay out an olive net
Koko about to undo all the good work

When the nets are ready, it's time to pick the olives. We were lucky that most of our trees have been pruned into a low wide shape so that we could reach most of the branches easily. In our right hand we held our chosen harvesting tool – an olive comb – and in our left we grabbed on to a branch of the tree and pulled it towards us. Then we scraped the comb as hard as we could through the leaves and pulled off the olives which bounced on to the nets below our feet. (This isn't as difficult or as unpleasant as picking carobs.)

An olive comb

An olive comb in action

Some people use mechanical tree shakers. In fact someone is using one right now in the valley below our house. It sounds like a strimmer – they're petrol-driven – and they vibrate the branches really hard so that the olives fall off (you can't really do this with your own strength – we tried). They probably make the job a lot quicker and easier, but some people say that they damage the tree.

Once we'd finished a tree, we had to herd the olives off the net and into a tub, making sure that we didn't flick up the wrong bit of net and see all our hard work tumble off down the hillside.

Some of our crop

After half a day's work it became clear that we weren't going to get enough for an oil pressing, which was a disappointment. Although word in the village is that it's a bad year for olives (not enough rain, wrong kind of wind, who knows?) we're holding out high hopes for next year. But we continued for the rest of the day and decided that we'd cure them ourselves. Update on the results coming soon.