faraway fara

We had our first olive harvest and pressed our first olive oil!

I made this video of the whole adventure and you can also read about our process below.

Ripening

Olives come into season when they want to. It depends on temperature and their general mood that year. Typically they are ripe between October and December. This year our olives were ripe the first week of October. All the olives were picked over a few days, we started on a Thursday and finished on Saturday.

Olive picking

When our olives became ripe the weather was great. But we were threatened by a large storm that would potentially cause all the olives to drop! So we had to pick right away. Our neighbor, Luca, taught us all about olive picking. He did each step with us this year and next year we get to try it alone. Now, I know you are thinking about this Luca situation. Wait until I tell you we have two neighbors named Luca! So we live on streets of Lucas now.

Step 1: Rete

The overall goal is to get the olives out of the tree. We do this by dropping them to the ground and then collecting them. The rete is a large woven plastic sheet that you put on the ground under the trees to catch the olives for easy collecting.

Tricks we found out: overlap rete to prevent spilling. Use a rock to secure around the base of the tree. Use sticks at the bottom to prevent roll aways on hills.

Step 2: Pick

The olives are picked by machine and hand. There is a machine that shakes back and forth and knocks the olives out of the tree. We had one machine from our neighbor, Luca, and the rest was done by hand. We mostly picked the lower olives by hand and then used the machine for the taller branches. This year our neighbor let us borrow all of his supplies, next year we will have to get our very own.

Step 3: Leaves and Boxes

Remove leaves from the olives because the leaves don’t have oil. We picked out some leaves and sticks by hand when we collected the olives in the rete. Then we used a little device that dropped most of the leaves on the ground.

To store the olives we kept them in plastic crates in the garage. We were told to keep the olives out of the sun but allow for some ventilation. And don’t touch them!

Step 4: Press

To get the oil out of the olives we had to get them pressed. We took them to a place in town that has all the machines to press the olives. An appointment was needed to press the olives because the factory gets very, very busy with all the whole town picking their olives at the same time`. To get a good price on pressing we combined our olives with our neighbors’ olives. In future years we might not need to combine our olives, but this year was hot and dry so we didn’t produce a lot.

The first step was to drive the olives to the factory. They weigh the olives so you can calculate your percent oil yield at the end. Then the olives start their journey on the conveyer belt. They are then washed, ground, and then they are churned for about 30 minutes. The oil and water is separated and then the oil is put into your large storage jug.

Step 5: Bottle

This was pretty simple, just funnel the oil into your tins or bottles!

Step 6

Enjoy!