La Raccolta delle Olive - The Olive Harvest!

Looking over the olive orchard

Today we began the olive harvest - la raccolta delle olive! We have been preparing for it since we arrived - Devlin has been diligently cutting the grass around the trees, we have been fixing holes in the nets (and the parachute!), pruning, and cleaning out blackberries. The weather has finally become good - we had to wait at least 2 days to let the olives dry out from the recent rain. Too much rain and too soon to harvest, and you will be pressing water, not oil!

We have our deadline: by Saturday at 3pm, the olives must go to the processing mill. Before then we have 50 trees to harvest. Although it is an "off" year - there are very few olives this year compared to last, there is still plenty to be done.

The parachute positioned under the first tree

How do you harvest an olive tree?

Step 1: position the parachute/net (we used the parachute only today) around the base of the tree. There is often more than one trunk! Olive trees can have 3 or 4 main trunks from the ground. Make sure the parachute covers this gap - it's easy to lose olives there. Overlap the edges of the parachute on one radius from the trunks.

Step 2: begin to harvest! Either use your hand to pick the olives individually, which we do when a tree has very few olives, or use a special plastic comb to pull the olives off the tree. Mostly, the leaves slide through the comb, but you do get some other debris (sticks, some leaves) that fall as well. We harvest every olive (a few missed ones get left "for the birds"): Devlin was up on the ladder most of the day, while Giovanna and I used combs on poles to reach the higher branches.

Step 3: go inside the tree to double check for missed olives. A ripe olive is black, a green one is unripe. But, some varieties of olives stay mostly green! It depends on the variety of olive (and there are a zillion!) We pick both the green and black: a good variety of olives will result in a richer oil. (Giovanna says that some people say a few sticks and leaves also add flavor, but I think that is just from laziness!) 

Step 4: once all the olives have been picked, carefully begin to gather up one side of the parachute, letting the olives roll down and accumulate. About midway, switch and go to the other edge, and repeat. Once all the olives are in one pile, pull out extra sticks/debris. At the mill, there is a machine to blow off the light debris, like leaves, but sticks are often too heavy and get left. (They also weigh your olives, so fewer sticks/leaves is better for that reason also). 

Step 5: gather up the olives in the parachute and place in special green plastic bins. Everyone seems to use the exact same type of bin here.

Step 6: pull the parachute to the next tree, and repeat.

During the olive harvest, it's important to keep working throughout the day, using as much of the daylight as possible. If you wait too long to finish the harvest, and let some olives sit, they can mold and turn bad. Normally, when not harvesting olives, we work from 8:30 to 1pm, have lunch, and then we can have the rest of the day off. At harvest time, we break for lunch, but then go back to it until the light fails.

By 3:30pm today, the low-slanting western light began to make the olives difficult to see. Green and black began to fade together, and we squinted against the harsh light. But, we pushed through to finish a row of olives which is mostly in the shade in the morning. (Today, we started late - we had to wait until 10am for the grass to be dry enough to harvest. Too much wet grass, and you get wet olives, which = mold.)

The day's harvest!

Tomorrow we begin again!
Pull out the parachute... :)