This page is dedicated to a custom in Greece that is still very alive whether commercial or for private reasons. It is olive picking. I will describe my experiences with olive picking and I am sure many other have different experiences.
I have made several diaries the last couple of years which give a day to day account of the olive picking we did. This page will try to explain the process and do’s and dont’s….
Olives 2017 
And we are off! Last night, almost in the dark, some last canes were cut so they can be used to get the olives out of the tree. We have had conversations in which part of the land we should start picking, we know around what time we will start, we have seen the weather bulletin, I have organized lunch, I am looking for old clothes now and need to do some shopping. Are we ready ???
If you put to many olives on a heap they will press themselves. We put a sheet down and put all the olives on there and fill the bags right before we take them to the olive press.
The first bucket
and the olives we picked after the first day.
When picking olives you always have olives leaves that you need to remove so this tool seperates the leaves from the olives. The cleaner the olives, the purer the olive oil.
When picking olives a feeling creeps up on you that you should pick up every good olive that is around because “we don’t want to waste one” This feeling is not a good feeling because every very small olive that falls between the slats of our “olive machine” you feel you need to pick up !!!
Today there were just the two of us. Husband and me. Pretty difficult but we managed to do one and a half trees before the rain started to fall quite hard. We collected all the sheets and nets, the buckets and the olives were brought to their resting place. Tomorrow another day….
With the weather not being good the next couple of days we decided on Tuesday morning to try and have the olives, we harvested so far, pressed. We found the guy in charge that day willing to put us on the afternoon list, around five. Because you don’t know how much olives the other are bringing in, the time your olives are being pressed is very flexible.
And so we got things going.
Get olives in bags
Clean containers
Get transport
We arranged for a truck to pick up the 18 bags. The truck could not get up our road so I had to drive down five times.
We were at the press from 4.30 hours until 09.30 hours. This press works very quickly!
It is nice to talk to people about the harvest. To wish everybody:” eat well from your olive oil” and to comment/gossip about the clean or dirty olives ( if they have a lot of leaves)
First batch 706 kilo of olives, 133 liters of olive oil. Quality 0,5. We are so grateful. We worked hard all together but it was worth it.
