The hills are alive....

with the sound of chainsaws! yes it's olive harvest time again and sometimes it's easier to prune branches that are too high and then pick off the olives rather than struggle to knock off the olives with a stick or try and climb the tree to reach them. Also some trees are too compact to climb so pruning is the only way to pick. We have done 2 trees over Monday and Tuesday, the first one was huge, provided 70kgs of olives and about a week of firewood for next year, all the green trimmings were taken by Juan from Yator (his family have a flock of goats and sheep) for animal food, the second was all pickable by hand from ground level and didn't need any pruning, but only produced 20kgs of olives. We took them to the olive mill in Yator this evening, they were cleaned (a sort of leaf blower) washed and weighed, we then got a chit to keep until we have taken in all our harvest and then we hand in all the chits when we have finished for either oil or money or a combination. Unfortunately this year is only paying out about 40 cents per kilo - last year was 80 cents. For oil, you need about 8kgs to produce 1 litre. So we have either earned 36 euros or got about 10 litres of oil. We have lots more trees to do in the coming weeks....