I have been asked to write a few words giving some hints and tips about
the noble art of harvesting olives for oil, and here they are…
So, first of all, what gives me the right to sit here and pontificate about the do’s and don’ts of olive harvesting? Well, not much really except that my partner Penny and I are just about to start our fourth season of whacking our 400 mature olive trees and, let's face it, it’s not exactly rocket science.
Me and Gelert the dog
When we first moved to our 5-acre farm in the hills near Kyparissia in May 2004, the prospect of dealing with all those olive trees was alarming to say the least. However, when it came to our first harvest, we had no shortage of advice from local Greek farmers, who were queuing up to give us the benefit of their wisdom. Rather confusingly, we were taught eight completely conflicting methods of how to prune an olive tree by eight different farmers.
'But Pavlos said we should do it like this,' I ventured when Yiorgos was teaching us his own techniques.
'Bah! That Pavlos is a nincompoop [a loose translation of Yiorgos's 'μαλακα' ]. He knows nothing about the olive.'
In the end, it was a case of developing our own methods based on what we'd been told and what seemed to have at least a tenuous foundation in common sense. This brings me to my first tip:
Tip One: Always listen to the advice of the experts. Then ignore most of it and develop your own way of doing things.
Tip Two: Don’t just listen, but watch as well and see how it’s done. The chances are that the people who are actually doing the olive harvest will not be Greek at all but immigrant workers from Albania, Rumania or Bulgaria.
Tip Three: Following on from Tip Two, if at all possible do as the vast majority of Greeks do and get someone in to harvest your olives for you. If you’ve never been involved in an olive harvest before, you may not yet realise quite how physically demanding and mind-numbingly tedious the work really is.
An 'elaiorabdistiko'
Tip Four: OK, so if you really insist on doing it yourself, use machinery wherever possible to minimise the physical pain.
After our last harvest, I suffered from 'olive harvester’s elbow' for the following eight months. This was even though we invested in a small petrol-driven portable generator with two long mechanical beaters after a couple of weeks of using the time-honoured method of whacking the trees with sticks. We paid almost €1,000 for the generator and beaters but worth every cent in my opinion - much less physically demanding and a lot less damage to the trees.
Another useful machine is an ελαιοραβδιστικο (I don’t know the English translation but there should be a picture here somewhere). This is also petrol driven and mounted on wheels. Basically, you just pull the branches through it that you’ve pruned and it knocks all the olives off. They’re supposed to all go neatly into the attached sack but, in our experience, most of them go flying all over the place so it’s a good idea to stand the thing on a couple of olive nets.
Handy Hint: If you use an ελαιοραβδιστικο, make sure you tweak the attached sack regularly or the neck of it will get jammed and you’ll end up with olive mush. Also, have a broom with you to sweep aside the olives that fall round your feet or you’ll crush loads underfoot.
Olive sacks
Tip Five: One thing you can’t do without is an ελαιοδιχτο (olive net) to catch the olives. In fact, you’ll need at least two and preferably several more. If you can afford it, get the solid tarpaulin-type ones and the green mesh ones. The advantage of the former is they don’t get loads of twigs caught up in them and don’t tear so easily. The latter are much better if it’s windy because they don’t turn themselves into olive-shedding parachutes.
Handy Hint: If you have dogs, check the ground for poo before you lay a net. We’ve been caught out like this before and it’s not pleasant when you realise too late after you’ve used the net the other way up for the next tree.
Tip Six: Health and Safety in Greece is, as most of us know, more honoured in the breach than in the observance. However, I believe olive harvesting should be registered as a Dangerous Sport (for more details, see my blog The Reluctant Olive Farmer at http://xerika.blogspot.com/ ). Two particular points to mention are:
Never use a chainsaw towards the end of the day when you’re tired and not concentrating. I nearly lost a leg last year by not following my own advice.
Always wear protective goggles when tree-bashing. They’re not comfortable and look silly and the locals will laugh at you but on the first day of last year’s harvest, I ended up going to the local hospital with a fragment of olive leaf in my eye and had to wear an eye patch for 24 hours. Bloody painful, I can tell you.
Well, that’s about all the tips and handy hints I can think of for the moment so it only remains to say:
If you are about to start (or already started) your olive harvesting, I wish you the best of luck.
If this is your first experience of olive harvesting and you have romantic notions of what fun it will be….. Oh dear. (Although I must admit that some people actually enjoy it. This includes my 78 year old mother-in-law.)
This harvest, we will be producing oil which is officially certificated as organic for the first time. We haven’t sorted out our website yet but if you’d like to buy some at very reasonable rates, please contact us by posting a comment here or sending me a personal message.
I know exactly what you mean Rob. We have only 105 olive trees, and did them ourselves this year for the first time. Frankly, I would rather chew my own legs off than do it again.
David (Super Administrator) • 2008-02-13 11:02:17
No.2 Feeding?
Hi Rob
Having picked your brain about pruning at the book fair, I have thought of another question..... do you feed your trees with anything, or is that not allowed as they are organic?
Pauline (Administrator) • 2008-02-19 22:24:50
No.3 THERE MINE ALL MINE
YES ROB ITS A BRAIN NUMBING JOB THAT YOU DO NEED TO BE FIT FOR AND GO ALONG ALL THE WAY ABOUT CHAINSAWING LATE IN THE DAY, BUT AT THE END OF THE DAY THEY ARE OUR OLIVES IN THE SACK, AND DOESN'T FILL GOOD WHEN YOU SEE THE OIL. SO WAS ALL THE ACHES WORTH IT YES. AND WE HAD NUMBING FINGERS FOR FOUR DAYS. SEE YOU AROUND SOME TIME BARRY AND SANDY
doctor46 (Unregistered) • 2008-02-20 21:32:22
No.4 Organic Fertiliser
Hi Pauline,
We feed our olive trees every year although it's a bit late now if you're thinking of doing it yourself. The best time is late December or early January in the hope that rain will then wash the stuff into the ground. Rain? What rain?
Even though we're organic, there are a number of products we can use such as Agro-Biosol and Patentkali. The amount and type of fertiliser we use is based on a soil analysis we had done a couple of years ago. You might want to do the same as it only cost about 40 euros.
Hi Barry and Sandy,
Yes, it's quite a buzz to see your own oil come flowing out but as for whether it's worth all the aches and pains..... Hmmm. I'll have to think about that one.
