Harvesting the olives ......

November and December is the main harvest time when everyone is out in their gardens or fields getting stuck in, helping each other to pick their olives. The quality of the olives will depend on what sort of weather the country has had, but as we are novices all we can say is that we have had plenty and have reaped a good return.

As we are "olive picking virgins" we were shown how to strip the branches simply by running your hand (or you can use a tool) down the branch for the olives to fall off onto large sheeting placed under the tree which also catches any that fall off anyway. They are then packed into large plastic sacks and tied up until its time to go the press.

We asked our good friend Jose to help us with this procedure as he is in a Farming Association. We have in our village a building called the Cooperativa Agricola where the olives are pressed. The procedure begins with the olives being put into a machine to strip off all the stems, leaves etc and washes them.

The next stage is the olive are pressing where the oil is filtered and strained off into huge tanks and is then ready to be poured off. Your olives are weighed and recorded into a logbook and you are then given back in pure virgin olive oil the amount the weight produced. We collected 70 kilos of olives which produced 9 litres of oil which we were well happy with. Unfortunately we still have lots more but at the moment cannot spare the time to pick them.

I was so proud to see my name in the log-book along with all our locals, I am showing you a picture!!!!

And the final result :- 9 litres of pure virgin olive oil !!!