20 November 2003 Blog Home : November 2003 : Permalink
I finished our Olive harvest this week. The house we own on the Riviera has 15-20 Olive trees (the reason why I gave an inexact number is because 5 of them are shared with our neighbour) and after 3 years of failing to get our act together and a less than stellar attempt last year I was ready to go for gold this year. Unfortunately the harvest has been less than stellar but I have a receipt from the olive mill entitling us to 3L of oil. The descritpion below, written a year ago, explains why this years crop has been so unexceptional. Unfortunately I'm goign to have to do more pruning this year so next year may not be much better.
Olive trees, or Oliviers as the French call them, don't like giving up their fruit - especially when the trees haven't been properly maintained. Although I can take some of the blame for the lack of maintenance our neighbour - who's Italian and experienced at the business - says that really the previous owners failed to do things properly and I just failed to reverse the previous neglect. Anyway the trees need drastic pruning which means that next year's crop is going to be a good deal less. Still we've wasted a good deal of this year's crop by not picking up the daily windfalls and by other beginner errors such as misplacing the nets so perhaps we'll be able to get about the same amount of oil. The key to picking olives seems to be violence. You start by putting a net on the cround under the tree to catch the olives as they come down and then you shake and pull at the branches to get the olives to fall down. Since our olive trees are far too tall and have not been properly pruned back we need a lot of nets and very long sticks to be beat the tops of the trees. The prefered tool is a sort of plastic rake or comb on a long stick which you drag through the branches. Initially I was worried about the damage this would do to the branches and leaves since the combed tree has all sorts of broken twigs and almost as many leaves as olives fall down. However our neighbour pointed out that firstly olives grow new branches every year and old ones die off and that secondly this year in particular most of the branches will not be lasting more than another month or two as they will be victims of the great prune we plan for Christmas. I think I'm goign to buy some kind of wood chip machine as the offcuts of 15 ollive treres will make masses of mulch and possibly even firewood if I can compress it into chipwood logs.
When the olives are on the net you realise that they don't look anything like the sorts of olives you buy pickled or stuffed. These trees are the local variety which is well regarded as a producer of oil rather than edible olives so this doesn't matter. The olives are a range of colours from green to black with many a pleasant half green, half red-brown. They are also knobbly, partly insect ridden and blemished from the violence of the picking. The work of separating the olives from the leaves and twigs that came down with them is probably harder than the picking. The mill will only buy olives and will refuse loads that ahve too many bits of muck so we have to be sure that we have removed as much as we can. Unfortuntalely thousands of years of peasant thought has failed to come up with a better way to do this separation than human hands. Traditionally villages harvest their olives communally because the human interaction makes the entire job palatable. If you do it on your own its boring and tedious, but the work flows better when you cna gossip about this and that. Next year we will harvest with our neighbour so as to ensure that we get that intangible as well as his knowledge of the fruit.
One of the true joys of finally harvesting our own olives is that we get to feel a part of the local countryside and traditions. Even though the Riviera is practically suburbia these days, there are plenty of links back to the rural past. Harvesting olive trees that could be anywhere from 20 to hundreds of years old helps us feel at one with the past. Both my wife and I feel that somehow by harvesting the olives we have begun to harmonize with the garden and the house. The act of cultivating brings order to the wilderness and with a garden covered in olive trees, failing to manage the olive trees is like only cleaning half the room sin the house. Unlike most houses in the region, we live in one of the original farmhouses (un vrai mas provencal) and the olives on their terraces surrounding the house have probably been there for centuries. We don't know quite how old they are but we estimate that two or three of trees are well into their second century and that even the sprightly 20 or 30 year old ones were probably planted to replace ancestral trees that finally gave up the ghost. It is very hard to really kill an old olive tree - we have the stump of an ancient tree near the front door which has two good sized sprouts - so I'm sure that the trees will forgive us our 3 years of neglect as we look forward to many years of peace with our Oliviers and many enjoyable meals cooked with oil produced by them or by their neighbours.
PS you can see some pictures at my other website