First lay out your nets. We have 3, each one is 8 metres by 4 metres, they take some moving, and you can't drag them in case they snag on the ground and make holes which the olives will fall through. Having laid them out, you need to peg the ones on the lower terrace up onto poles so the olives don't roll away as they land. Then you can start harvesting. This is usually done by whacking the branches with a long pole or by using a large plastic comb to separate the olives from the branches. Even though they are very black and oily they don't want to come off easily. Lots of leaves and small ends of branches all come down as well, these have to be thrown away before the olives are put into sacks.
Any well-laden branches that we can't reach, John cuts out as part of the pruning process and I pick it clean when it's on the ground, when one tree is finished and the olives are bagged, then we tidy up the trimmings, firewood etc before moving on to the next tree.
As you can imagine, it's a time consuming business but usually it's worth doing for the oil and cash. This year however the price is less than last year and that was even lower than we'd ever known.... we're down to 30 cents a kilo. I'm sure the supermarket price will be the same though.
So 4 hours work, 3 trees harvested (1 small, 1 straggly with very little on it and 1 good one) has given us 1 sack of olives. About 30 kilos, which will pay about €9. They do say it's better than nothing and every little helps....at least the sun was shining and I had nothing else to do!
But here are some sunny photos of olives and someone in the distance is burning their olive trimmings.
No comments:
Post a Comment