Olives, Olives, Olives!

Another delicious post by Christina Wolf:

This past weekend was spent picking olives, watching beautiful sunsets, and making olive oil!  Through the WWOOF Italia site, we found a farm that was willing to put us up for the weekend.  We arrived to the farm early Friday morning and were soon picking away.   The farm was 5 Hectares and had 50 olive trees, tons of grapes, and other fruits and vegetables.  We primarily worked on the olive harvest.

These trees were not small.... It took us a whole day to do just ONE tree by hand.  We had to use ladders and ropes to get to the top branches. That one tree had 100 kilos worth of olives... thats about 200 pounds. Harvesting olives is very relaxing and fun- there is no wrong way to do.  You just run your hand over the branch and they all fall off... or you can give it a shake.

That night we helped Fabio make the oil.  He has a small machine that produces about 1 Liter , in 3 hours time.  Most farmers will bring their olives to a communal olive press at the end of their harvest, where you pay and it takes one hour to produce...  but Fabio doesn't agree with that.  He doesn't want his olive oil to mix with others.  I had a lot of respect for this man.  He wakes up at 5AM to make a batch of oil, works in the field from 8-5, then makes another batch of oil from 5-8pm.  Talk about a long day!  So far he has harvested half of his trees in a months time putting in way over 100 hours. Fabio has little help on the farm, except for the occasional WWOOFER.  His right-hand women is his 90 year old mother-in-law, who works just as hard as him.  I hope I have that ability at 90...  

The mesh catchs all the olives

Trying to keep our lovely cabin warm! 

Annie on the 6m ladder!