Today we have started the third round of #olive picking. I'll see if I can post the occasional picture, might have to fill in ALT text when I'm home (it's tricky to keep on taking off gloves).
We don't just harvest fully manually with those olive picking combs, as that would take forever:
We also use a couple of battery powered olive harvesters. These have 8 carbon fibre rods, which oscillate rapidly, shaking the olive off the tiny branches they are attached to.
Even so, it took about 90 minutes for 3 people to harvest that one tree on the right.
In-between harvesting each tree the olives have to be picked up from the netting, filled into buckets and transported over to a trailer using a wheelbarrow.
Finally the now empty nets are moved to the next tree.
Here you can see a bit better how we spread out the nets to catch as many #olives as possible.
Someone still has to pick up all the ones that decide to fly even further or slip through the gaps between the nets.
All the buckets full of olives and leaves get poured onto the metal grill where someone (in this case me) has to try to separate them from each other by rubbing manically while wearing leather gloves.
We then put the leaves into boxes to feed them to our #goats.
@axwax There's nothing wrong with as you call it peasant-style that's way better then the mass production types in my eyes. Do you press your own oils ?
Actually, it was meant to be a little tongue-in cheek, as that's what the big farmers around us think of us.
One could also call it artisanal, and yes, I do believe our oil is much better than the mass-produced stuff. 😊
For a start (and to answer your question), while we go to a commercial mill, we have our own line there when we book it to guarantee we only get oil from our own olives, whereas most other farmers in the region receive a blend of several people's oil.
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