Olives II

In the previous post, I mentioned that Megumi had harvested about 20kg of olives for pickling. Now we've finished harvesting from the six trees in our garden and have some olive oil to show for our efforts.

The trees yielded another 52kg (as measured once we got them to the press). It took us a few sessions, of a few hours each, to get them all. This mostly involved placing a ladder into the tree, climbing up, and pulling the knocking or pulling the olives down so they fell into sheeting (plastic in our case) laid around the base of the tree. Sometimes, where they were too high up to reach, I simply cut off a branch; it's good to keep the trees to a sensible height, not least because it makes the picking easier!

All in, we filled two large bins, which we then had to sort (to remove leaves and other foreign matter). We weren't quite sure how to handle them after that, especially after it became clear some friends would not, after all, pool ours with theirs. So last Friday, we decided to head off to one of the local presses to see if we could get them processed. Our neighbour Alice, a very kindly soul, gave us directions so it was easy to find.

We arrived to find a rough-and-ready place, crowded with people obviously waiting for their harvests to be dealt with. We had no idea what the system was, and it took a while to locate the boss. In the end, he came and looked at our measly two bins full and set an assistant -- bit of a dubious looking character -- to the task of rinsing the olives and putting them into sacks. Evidently, sacks are the standard -- as they allow the olives to be weighed easily -- and this was a special service for the ignorant foreigners! Anyway, all seemed to be well, our newly sacked olives were weighed and stacked in the storage area, and we hung around waiting.

We didn't really know what was going on, and with all the noise and hustle-&-bustle of a busy workshop it was difficult to make ourselves understood. We did know that if one has enough olives (perhaps several hundred kg) they would go in a single batch -- so one would get oil from ones own olives. With a smaller amount, they are pooled. But we weren't sure if our pooled sacks would have to wait for other small quantities to make up a batch, or if there was some other system. But whatever the story, lots of people were just hanging around presumably waiting for their batch to be processed. So we waited too. I noticed that some people got little green tickets -- presumably information about their batch, how many kg, etc. I expected we would get a receipt too -- with a record of how much oil we were due. (The basic story is that a percentage of the oil comes back to the grower, while some is retained by the press as payment.)

It was quite interesting just watching what was going on. Olives were being loaded by the ton, one sack at a time, into a hopper. From there they entered a machine for washing beofre disappearing through a pipe into the main press facility next door. Looking through, we could see the machines at work and smell the warm oil. Every few minutes a pickup or lorry would arrive with more. Some were stacked on the floor, while others went straight into the hopper; clearly some people had booked batches the previous day (as a notice on the wall suggested was the rule).

After observing all this for half an hour or more, a kind gent came up to us and suggested we could go anytime and collect our oil. This despite the fact that our olives were still waiting in sacks on the floor. So off we went, into the next room where the main processing was taking place. At the far end was the collection area, with a few tanks and, again, people hanging around. Here, everyone had plastic bottles and barrels in various sizes waiting to be filled. Somehow, we were at the front of the queue; as soon as we walked over (with a number of plastic bottles that, anticipating this situation, we had brought with us) our allotment was decanted off into a five-litre jug and poured into our bottles. We had no receipt and don't know how or when the quantity we were to receive was communicated to the man in charge of decanting. But the five litres tallied with what we had been told -- that the good presses return about 10% (five litres for 50kg) while others take more for themselves

A litre of our oil, after decanting into something a bit prettier than a plastic pop bottle!