Then last 3 days were tough for me with a lot of manual work to do. As I have told you 2 months ago I moved to my cottage at Preveza city. Preveza is a city where people get involved with argicultural works cause it's climate is warm and perfect for vegetables, fruits and olives. This month is the ideal to harvest olive crops and produce virgin oil. Olive trees usually give crops every two years. My land has also many olive trees, about 150 and surprisingly it is now the second year in a row that give us crops which is something unusual. For me it is the second year I have the oportunity to be here and help my parents with the harvest and I have to say that is an extremely hard and wearing work to do.
My parents, my brother and my grandma were here and also for the first year my boyfriend @knowhow92 was here to help and see the whole process. Learning to do this work right from the older generations is so important, they know so many things and have so much experience through all these years that they do this. It is something that the next generation which is us need to know in order to keep producing our own olive oil and at the same time continue the tradition of our families. My parents explained us patiently every step of the proccess and watched us trying it until they made sure that we do it right. We started by laying long nets in every row of trees in order to cover them around. We did this in order to not let the crops fall to the ground and make it easier for us to collect them.
There are two ways to harvest the olive crops from the trees. The one way is using a long hand machine that drops down the crops which is not easy to use especially for hours but it does a lot of work with a big amount of olives. The other way is using by hand a tool that looks like a comb and literally groom the olive branch little by little. It would be need whole weeks to finish every tree with those combs and also impossible to reach every high olive branch so it is not the easiest way for sure. We usually have a combination of those two, someone uses the single machine we have for the high parts and the others work with the combs at the low parts of tree.
Olive crops fall into the nets. Some of them are unripened others are riped but it doesn't matter in the end cause the oil will be delicious with the combination of both. Also here you can se two different types of olives.
Everytime we drop a decent ammount of crops, we raise the nets in order to gather them to a spot all together. It is important to do this often and not let too much weight on the nets cause they might get ripped. As soon as we gather them to a spot we separate the crops from the woods and the branches and throw them away. My grandma is almost 80 years old and she was bending over and squating like a young girl to work with us. Those people of that generation are just tireless warriors, right?
As soon as the crops are clean from beanches we collect them at buckets and then empty them into big gunny sacks that can carry 30-40 kg each.
Oh here is a weird dude I saw on the ground while working. His colors were so beautiful and his body seems like having funny fish faces on or something hahah. Also he seems like he has two face as well and he actually was big enough for a worm. I have never seen something like this before.
I drove my grandpas tracktor for the first time in order to to transfer the gunny sacks. It has been in our house for over 50 years hehe. We collected 60 gunny sacks of at least 30 kg each from all the trees. This was like 3 full days of work!
As soon as we finished and packed all the crops the next step was to clean all the nets we used from woods, leafs and branches in order to be safe and ready for the next harvest. This is really important in order to avoid been eaten from rats at the winter because we keep the nets outside. We cleaned the nets and then folded them.
Having finished with folding the nets, now we have to take care of the trees and make sure that they will be strong and healthy for the next years. We used organic booster for the trees, standard bird dropping which is really helpful but god smells horible. We poured it around every stem of olive trees.
The last part was to visit the oil press warehouse to produce our oil. The process has a few steps until the oil starts to flow. It is starting with the first step where you throw the gunny sacks on this machine with those steps which is separating the olive crops from the leafs. It is also washes the crops in order to be ready for the next step.
For the next step the olive crops pass though to another machine where they smashed up over and over until it becomes a mixture.
For the last step the mixture passes through another machine that washes it and getting it ready to become liquid oil. Look at this beautiful clean green color of oil, isn't it amazing?
This journey finally came into an end. It was a 3-day of hard work with a lot of weariness but the result payed us all more than we expected. We harvested 1600 kg of olive crops and we produced about 280kg of olive oil with an output of 18%. We have our organic virgin oil that is enough for more than a whole year. This oil needs about 10 days until it's ready to eat. It is a blessing knowing that you consume your own oil which is 100% natural and healthy and also knowing that this has been produced by your own personal work.
Thank you all for stopping by guys, I hope you enjoyed my post and the whole process of olive oil. I hope you all have a great day!
