It's that time of year again - Olive picking! Our third season or crop! Picking is usually the latter part of November/early December and its a case of hoping for a few bright sunny days. We have also been fortunate to have help, this years volunteers Ian & karen drove all the way from Glasgow to experience the occasion! Thank fully after a wetish November the sun is back, its very cold but also very sunny.
From our first harvest, in 2006 we collected 19 Kilos of Olives. This is Karen (below!)getting into the swing of it.
Ian, as well as picking Olives ensured my safety whilst I buried myself in the trees to pick the blighters!
Our 9 trees, in the garden of Les Cypres, are about 100 years old.An early Frost in 1956 killed the original branches on thousands of trees in the Vaucluse. But being very hardy new shoots grew creating todays 'trunks'. We had our trees cut and pruned very hard after the picking in 2006 so they did not produce so many Olives in 07.
Instead the bulk of the 48 Kilos we picked then came from trees on our new plot where we have about a dozen large trees albeit we have moved and divided half of them as they were in the way of where the house now stands. We will eventually move those again and re plant them so in the future will have a huge number of Olives to collect, indeed if we picked over 100 Kilos we could get our own pressing.
And so to this years harvest, just from the trees at Les Cypres we took two large tubs to the local mill where they are pressed for exquisite Olive Oil which is sold for about 14€ a litre. And we collected 66 Kilos giving us back 13.2 litres of cold first pressed Oil.
No comments:
Post a Comment