Our harvest
How do we harvest
At harvest time we enjoy collecting the olives from our trees on the slopes of the hill overlooking the Niccone valley as the mist rises and the sun dries the fields. Often the weather is mild and the temperatures stay pleasant during the day if slightly colder at night. The harvest is entirely hand-picked without use of machines or mechanical aids. We collect around 1 ton of olives a week.
We place a strong emphasis on traditional, sustainable and environmentally responsible farming practices. Our relatively small scale of production allows us to focus on quality over quantity. We avoid pesticide and fertilisers. We 100% hand pick our olives. We don’t use branch shakers or tree shakers which ensures our olive groves remain healthy and live long. We practice a pruning that prioritises the tree and its vitality rather than the olive-picker and the desire for easy harvesting.
We employ a harvesting method that Catia, our neighbour, favours: a slightly unusual, yet effective practice of hanging umbrellas in the trees to catch olives as they are picked by hand. This method is a superb answer to collecting olives on a steep slope. We can avoid not only the use of machines, but also the use of nets, which are time and labour intensive and which don’t truly stop the olives from rolling away. We love the playful, slightly offbeat things in life and harvesting olives into upside-down umbrellas really appeals to our sense of fun and delight.
Hand-picking our olives results in less bruising and a higher quality of fruit. It also facilitates a wonderful atmosphere around the tree. As we hand-pick the fruit we chat; for old acquaintances renewing our bonds, and for new acquaintances getting to know one another on a deeper level.
All this means that our olive harvest is a fairly relaxed operation. Indeed, we are not a commercial business. We have up to 3000 trees, which in a good year at 20-25kg of olives (roughly one crate) per tree comes to around 70 tons. At a 13-17% return, this gives us about 10 tons of olive oil. However, we tend to pick less than 1 ton a week of olives at harvest time, not least since the weather can be changeable, and these olives are used simply for our purposes over the following year. Some olives are macerated for eating and others dried for cooking.
The olive harvest is a highly-anticipated, much-loved occasion each year. And as the results come in, early one morning after milling the first product from our olive harvest we pour oil on some warm toasted bread, crack some salt over it, and enjoy the immediate results of our combined labours: a vibrant green-gold, medium-bodied, organic olive oil, cold pressed, extra virgin, which although youthful and slightly piccante already shows hints of sweetness. The cold-pressing method helps preserve all the natural flavour and nutrients.
Catia gives a prayer of thanks over the shared bruschetta doused in the freshly-pressed olive oil and salt… And together we relish the satisfaction of a successful harvest and give thanks to nature’s bounty. The simple act of pouring our own pure olive oil, straight from the mill, onto our freshly-baked sourdough bread, the vibrant yellow-green against the white, is one of life’s great delights.
