Working at the right place is quite important to have an easy experience of harvest. Such place requires:
A flat field instead of a steep one.
Clear grass between the trees instead of bushes.
Relatively small trees instead of huge ones.
Example of a nice olive field.
Once the olives are mature enough, we can move to the harvesting part.
Materials
Large nets to lay underneath the trees while harvesting to collect the olives
Sewing tools
Plastic brushes to remove olives from the branches
Electrical tool to remove olives from the branches of bigger olive trees
Multiple baskets
Bruno, Ece & Louis!
Preparatory steps
Check if the nets have holes in them, if so then fix the nets by sewing the holes.
Fixing holes on the nets.
Underneath the olive trees should be as clean as possible in order to be able to put the nets around the trees.
Cut off /trim the small branches coming from the roots and lower part of the trunks, cut off the wild plants growing in the vicinity of the trees. You can use scissors, saw or an electrial knife for it.
Cleaning up at the roots of the trees.
Collect all the trimmed branches in a spot, where you can burn them later.
Collected branches.
Harvesting
Lay nets around the trees so that all surrounding of a tree is covered.
The nets set around the olive tree.
Start picking olives, this can be done by hand or using a plastic brush
Removing the olives from the branches!
or using an electrical brush, which is the fastest way.
When olives from one tree are picked either move the nets to the next closeby tree, and do the same for it or move on to next step.
Collect all the olives in the middle of the net.
Remove big branches and leaves.
Cleaning up the gathered olives from big branches
Transfer the olives to a basket
You are done with this tree!
Now can move to the next one and start over from step 1 of harvesting :)
Once done, you end up with this:
Result of two mornings of work!
Tips
Start as early as possible in the morning, when the sun is high it becomes unbearable to work under it.
Don’t forget to bring water with you!
The morning dew is wetter than you think, wear appropriate shoes.
From olives to olive oil
Once we have harvested the olives, we bring them to a company which processes these. First we ditch the olives in a machine that will remove the leaves:
You can see the result of the separation here:
Then the olives are weighted (we gathered 137kg!) and then processed in one day to make olive oil!
