I was fantasising about this post many months now. It was supposed to be my enthusiastic return to the #hivegarden community after months of absence. A post about the thrill of the olives harvest and the excitement of our reunion with the farm that we hadn't seen all summer. A festive post full of gratitude for the fruits of our land and the joy of hard, yet productive work.
We made the trip from Nafplio to Crete with a slight concern. We knew that this was not going to be a good harvesting year but we were hopping for a decent crop.
Reality hit us like a ton of bricks!
We arrived at our first olive grove, the one that we believed it was the most promising one, on November 5th. What we saw almost made us cry. The land parched, the tree leaves brown, instead of green and the scenery overall, on the verge of desertification. And with no irrigation water available in this area, we were helpless.
I didn't found the courage to take any pictures of the olive trees. This was something that I want to forget and hopefully, never see again in my life.
The next day, still shocked by the sight of our poor trees, we continued our trip to the eastern part of the island, where most of our land is.
But the prognosis was not good.
Not good at all.
The visit to the herb garden was traumatic too. Most of the herbs were dead or almost dead. We watered them anyway but it felt pointless, like giving comfort care to a patient that doesn't have any hope of healing. I didn't found the courage to take any pictures of the dying herbs either but you can see an example at the pictures above. They are two plants of cistus creticus, indigenous in Crete that are growing without any human care. The one on the left was next to a dripping water pipe and it is as they all should have been in this time of the year. The one on the right is in the condition that almost all the plants are all over the place. Dry and struggling to remain alive. The shock became even bigger.
Grapes in the middle of November (picture above), is not a usual sight but on the other hand, nothing was usual this year. At least the carob trees seemed happy and full of immature fruits and the loquat were blooming beautifully. As for the olive trees, the ones that we came to harvest, they were miserable and fruitless. The possibility that the trees were irreversibly damaged from the drought, started to raise in my head.
One small olive grove, on a shady slope across the village, gave us some hope. Not that the trees were thriving but they did have a few olives on them! Rather samples of olives, tiny and skinny but it was something. We watered them relentlessly and we let them be, for a couple of weeks, till they absorb the water.
The grass was the first sign of life on the watered land and finally at the 20th of November, the trees were green again and we had a few olives to harvest! The smallest that we ever had, few on each tree and hard to pick but it didn't matter. We were grateful and delighted that we had even them!
The harvesting was strictly family business. Myself, 
boss friend, supervising the procedure :)
Of course after all that drought it had to rain during the days of the harvest!
That's Murphy's law, isn't it?
But we didn't mind. We had a day off and I had the chance to take a few pictures of our olives decorated with small droplets of water :)
After a few days of work we were done. The smallest harvesting period we ever had, the less production of olive oil we ever had (around 3% of last year's production) but the most grand feeling of success :)
I am sorry if I used too many photos. I know that 
This was the eleventh part of our trip from Nafplio to Crete, in order to harvest our olives and visit the places and the people that formed our daily life for almost a decade. It lasted from the first of November till the fifth of December and it was totally different from whatever we anticipated.
Below are the links of the previous posts or you can just visit my blog and scroll down.
All the pictures and the words are mine.
Thank you for reading and if you want to know more about me you can check out my introduction post.
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