Olive Harvesting
It’s olive harvesting season here in the Alentejo. It’s a busy time of year as property owners with olive trees (which includes just about everyone around here) scramble to pull all those green and black fruits from the trees. Whether you’re plucking with your hands or whacking with a stick, getting all the olives off the tree is a big job. Although the thought of harvesting our own olives sounds like a fun project, we decided to let the olives ripen on the trees and just fall to the ground. Sounds a bit sad but we couldn’t find anyone to harvest them for us (about a dozen trees) and frankly I just wasn’t interested in doing it myself this year. I’ll save that project for another year after I’ve done a bit of research on harvesting and curing olives. There are plenty of delicious olives to buy at the local markets, so I think we’ll survive just fine on someone else’s harvest for this year.
Although we decided not to harvest our olives this year, I decided to test the waters by tackling this one small olive shrub. It’s about 8ft tall so I wasn’t able to get the olives at the very top but I pretty much cleared the majority of the tree which yielded one large bucket of olives.
Speaking of bucket, the bucket I used for olive picking is actually for feeding horses. It has to be the most expensive bucket I’ve ever purchased but sometimes a beautiful vessel for a mundane task is the only way to enjoy the experience. As you can see in the photo below, I picked about 16 liters of olives, which is surprisingly heavy. It weighs about 29 lbs/13 kilos . All these olives are from just one shrub; not a full size tree. It takes about 5 kilos of olives to make one liter of olive oil, so my little harvest, if pressed, should yield about 2.5 bottles of oil. Not bad for a few hours work.
I had fun practicing olive picking and look forward to participating in a real harvest next year. In the meantime, the vendors at the Estremoz farmers market will do just fine to satisfy my craving for olive snacking and to garnish drinks. Martini anyone?
