Yesterday I stopped by my parent's house to harvest some olives from the big olive tree they have in their entrance yard. I like doing it every year but sometimes olive trees, like many other fruit trees, have a bad season, growing rotten olives due to weather conditions. You can hardly realize they are rotten unless you open them and see black dots inside. This is what happened last year so we had to forget about harvesting and pickling the olives.
This year the tree looks full of fruits and we had checked days before they were all healthy so yesterday I stopped by to pick some.
I wanted to reach the highest ones as they were slightly bigger, so I set the stairs to climb up and prune some of the dead small branches to be able to reach the olives I was looking for,
After one hour of hand-picking them one by one, I ended up with about 5kgs of nice green fresh olives to take home ready to pickle.
It was a nice practice as I have 110 olive trees on the land we just purchased in Portugal. Most of the trees there are smaller than my parents as they have been taken care of to maximize production instead of tree growth, but still, it's a considerable amount and I can't wait to harvest them next season to get my own olive oil.
Of course, I will have to use a different method or it would take me a month to get all those olives. Will probably purchase an electric olive stirrer to make them fall down from the tree to the ground where I will set a big net to collect them. I will then use an old manual shaker the house has, to separate the leaves from the olives, and finally will bring them to the local coop mill to get my oil.
