The olives go to the mill. Time to celebrate.

Too exhausted to write a proper blog post, but here are a few pictures that sum up the final day of this year's olive harvest: stacking the crates (21 of them), beer break, unloading at the mill, the view from Masciantonio’s, and finally that end-of-harvest dinner, which also happened to be someone’s birthday. That’s 440kg of olives. We’re picking up 70 litres extra virgin olive oil tomorrow.

More pictures and video from the oil mill and of our lovely new oil tomorrow.

How to pick olives: Krappy’s four-point guide

We’re starting the fifth and final day of what promises to be our best-ever harvest. It’s been olives all the way since Sunday. Cascades of lustrous black olives tugged from low hanging branches. Green olives in clusters. The sound of hard ripe olives hitting the hessian net. Great rivers of them, drenched in sunshine, being rolled together into olive lakes and poured into crates. I’ve been dreaming of olives, waked from olive nightmares.

So far we’ve filled 18 crates, with three empty and waiting. There is one tree left to harvest this morning, though it’s probably the most difficult. That’s 21 crates, or just over four quintale. We will somehow get the olives over to Masciantonio’s mill by lunchtime or early afternoon, then wait for the results. By Saturday we should be collecting somewhere between 40 and 50 litres of oil, perhaps much more.

It’s not been without its moments. It's been hard work. We all have aching shoulders and fractious backs. We now know you can get repetitive strain injury from using a saw or an olive rake. We all have sore hands and scratched arms. We’ve played roulette with the weather. But nobody has dropped out of a tree or fallen off a ladder, impaled themselves with an olive knife, lost a finger, or been bitten by a snake. Yet.

A mini-crisis came early, when we realised we didn’t have enough crates. The crates are hard plastic, like orange boxes, with holes in the sides so the olives can breathe. It’s important to store the picked olives in them. We found eight in the cellar; they haven’t been used for three years. There was one being used to store tools, and another under the barbecue full of ash.

We drove to Fara San Martino in the afternoon to buy more. But the hardware store had run out. Emergency! Early on Tuesday morning I set off to solve the problem. Our neighbour, Elvira, was still using hers. It looked like a long drive to the ferramenta at Casoli. But then step forward another neighbour, Angelo d’Alessandro. I found him spray-painting some ironwork in his yard. He’d already harvested his olives, and his crates were stored in a barn. I was able to borrow a dozen empties from him. Saved!

The second crisis was a weather wobble. Most of the time it’s been wonderfully sunny and warm. But at mid-day on Tuesday, while we were half way through tree number four, the sky went black and the wind got up, clouds rolled down the valley and the sun disappeared. The temperature dropped from short-sleeved sunny to arctic and it looked like rain. A storm was coming. We hastily rolled up our net, lugged the crates under shelter and hid indoors.

The afternoon was bleak. We had our olive-pickers’ picnic indoors, it was too cold outside. The chill was not helped by a central heating failure in the house (it’s fixed now, thankfully). But the rain never actually arrived. A couple of hours later the weather improved again, though by now it was too late in the day to get much more picking done. We lit a fire and hunkered down to Facebook, spaghetti carbonara and red wine.

As a result of all this, we've have refined our olive-harvesting skills and adapted them to pick up speed. Here is Krappy’s instant guide to harvesting olives.

First, you lay out a net about the size of a tennis court. There are then four basic techniques. One - The Strip. This is where you stand on the ground and comb your rake down through the low-hanging branches. Olives cascade into the net below. A technique associated with glorious weather, happy contadini gossiping about their neighbours, red wine, and singing maidens. Satisfaction ratio: five stars.

Two - The Stretch. Those pesky olives are just above head-height. You stand on tiptoe and try to capture the fruit just tantalisingly out of reach. You stretch. You lunge. You jump. You leap. Finally you grasp at a twig, bend down a branch, capture it one-handed and desperately denude the tree of its olives with the other. Associated with shoulder ache, elongated neck, twanging knees and desperate yoga. Satisfaction ratio: four out of five (people who try this survive).

Third technique - The Chop. You climb the tree with a saw, a lopper and a pair of secateurs and try to hack down as many olive-bearing branches as possible, so that they fall into the net. An alternative is to try to get a ladder up the tree and go up that way. Hopefully, your helpful team members will be waiting at ground level to strip the olives into the net. You are pruning the tree at the same time as harvesting. Associated with - well, the possibly painful consequences of climbing a tree or a ladder are too obvious to mention. Those trees are high. Those ladders do slip sideways. Bravado rating: eleven out of ten.

The fourth technique - The Chop and Run. You don’t bother about the net and simply hack down as many branches as you can reach, drag them to somewhere where someone’s got a net laid out or lug them up the drive to the covered portico near the house, where they won’t get wet if it rains. Then strip them later. This is the most desperate measure. Associated with: laziness, recklessness, lack of time, need for coffee. Satisfaction ratio: below the horizon.

Oddly enough, the last, desperate measure is the one we’ve adopted more and more of late as we struggle to fill our boxes before our deadline - lunchtime today.

Our final crisis may still be to come - how will we get our olives to the mill? We’d never thought of that. Twenty-one crates of olives weighing more than 400kg is a lot to get into a small car. Luckily, our neighbour Angelo has heroically offered to drive us and the olives over in his truck, but that won’t be until this afternoon, after his shift at the pasta factory - now we are worried that it might be too late for the olive mill. So perhaps we’ll be making four trips by Fiat Uno instead. Oh dear. More telephone calls. 

Watch this space.

Net gain. Best harvest in years!

We’re now two days into the Casa della Meridian olive harvest and there's lots of excellent news. It’s the best harvest in years. After three bad seasons, the olives are plentiful and the oil will be of excellent quality - and lots of it. Masciantonio’s award-winning oil mill at Caprafico is booked for Thursday. And the weather is better than expected. But progress is slow - this is hard work!



So far we’ve stripped and pruned three trees. There are eight to go. We’ve filled eight crates with fruit and stacked them under the portico. That’s around 160kg. But we calculate that the final harvest will be about 450kg of olives (in Italian olive-speak that’s four and a half quintali - a quintale is 100kg). And we have until Thursday to get them off the trees and into boxes.

Harvesting started well, but slowly. On Sunday morning, with clear skies and fine weather, Bobbie and I started on the first tree. This is a monster that overhangs the entrance steps and is laden with fruit, but is very difficult to harvest. Our olive-stripping skills are rusty. I’ll post a video tomorrow to demonstrate. We laid down a net, and used little hand-rakes to strip low-hanging fruit from the bottom branches. Thousands of black olives cascaded into the net.





By coffee-time we realised we were only going to finish one tree in the day. This first tree is on sloping ground, very tall, split into four and hard to climb. We got the ladder out and began on the upper branches. The ladder was a death trap. Eventually we realised we'd save time by simply chopping the top branches down and stripping them on the ground. It was actually hot. By three o’clock I was shirtless. ‘Aren’t you cold’ asked a passing farmer. No.



By dark, we’d finished the tree, filled four crates and got them under shelter. We had tea. The rain started about six o’clock. When we began the long drive to pick up the rest of the olive-picking team from Chieti Scalo, it was just a drizzle. It got worse. We ended up driving for the next hour in torrential rain and sheet lightning, along flooded and unlit roads, with blind bends, hairpins and no road markings. And then we got lost in Chieti in the dark.



This was not the easiest of trips.  The day ended brilliantly though. With no food in the house (shops all closed on Sunday) and no time to cook anyway, we headed straight for a restaurant - Trattoria del Lago on the edge of Lake Casoli.

This was a good decision: it turned out to be brilliant. A very classy first course of a platter of meat and cheese with toothsome little pickles and jams, followed by excellent meat and fish, and lashings of local red and white wine. Fully restored and adequately refuelled now - ready to get back to work. We’ll sleep well.

Tomorrow: we pick, prune, visit the olive mill, and go to a bar. And we end up dining on Shelley’s magnificent veal involtino in front of the blazing hearth.

Early harvest start - and an unexpected visitor

Casa della Meridiana, Gallo, Abruzzo, Italy, Sunday, 7am:  We arrived here late last night, after picking up a hire car at Pescara Airport and stopping for a pizza on the way up the Sangro Valley. There has been a change of plan. We are going to start picking today.

The reason for this is that rain is forecast to arrive on Tuesday morning. It’s a drastic change of plan. Our co-pickers Shelley and Hugh are in Rome for the weekend pretending to be Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. They will curtail their Roman Holiday and take the bus over from Rome this evening, and I’ll pick them up in time for supper.

Bobbie and I should be able to pick two or three trees by ourselves today, and all four of us will do the other eight or nine tomorrow. We can finish the job before the rain comes, and get the olives to the mill on Tuesday morning.

It’s going to be a difficult schedule today. There’s no food in the house except some frozen croissants and a carton of UHT milk, so one of us is going to have to drive to the supermarket for supplies. It’s Sunday and the only shop open anywhere nearby is a 20-minute drive away, so that’s going to take up an hour of the day. I also have to visit the oil mill, a 20 minute drive in a different direction.  And then I’ll have to drive an hour to Chieti Scalo to collect the rest of the crew.

This is the view that greeted us this morning at dawn. The sun comes up across the valley and today it promised good weather. The mountains in the distance are looking south towards Molise. Acres and acres of olive trees stretch for miles as far as the eye can see up the valley. Our own handful of trees are just below the house.



My motto here is ‘expect the unexpected'. And here’s today’s piece of the ‘unexpected’ - a visitor. This little chap was sitting in our garden when we arrived. He (or she) is lovely, friendly, affectionate, quite a beautiful animal - and hungry.  Presumably a stray, abandoned quite recently by the look of it. What a shame.  We found a tin of tuna which it gobbled down. It looks like we’ll have him (or her) for the week.

Picking for 2017 starts on Tuesday 6th November

Harvesting of the olives for Stroud Green Olive Oil will start at Casa della Meridiana on Tuesday morning, weather permitting. The team of olive-pickers will be Mike and Bobbie accompanied this year by two of our Stroud Green friends and neighbours, Shelley and Hugh, who will be harvesting olives for the first time.

In our own orchard we have only 12 trees, so with a spell of dry weather we should be able to complete the picking comfortably in two days. However there is a lot more to harvesting than just picking the olives from the trees. It’s going to be a busy week. First we have to check and clean all our equipment, buy new rakes, and buy tins to store the oil in.

We’ll need to visit the oil mill early to book a slot for processing the olives. This has to be done as soon as possible after the olives are taken off the trees, so it will have to be on Wednesday or Thursday. If we leave it too late, or the olives get too wet, they’ll rot or be infested by insects, so everything has to be co-ordinated fast. We should be able to pick up the oil on Friday.

If there is demand, we will need to source additional oil from neighbours. Our next door neighbour Elvira, 85, has produced artisanal oil for years, and we have bought extra supplies from her in the past. There are hundreds of families making oil in the valley and most have been harvesting and making oil using traditional methods for generations. We will taste the oil and either buy harvested olives or pressed oil at local prices.

When we start picking the olives, we’ll use nets, ladders and hand rakes - I’ll be illustrating this as we go along. And at the end of the week, we’ll be celebrating a successful harvest with a slap up meal and lashings of red wine with Italian friends at a local trattoria. Watch this space for some harvesting pictures and some excellent menu tips!

'Maltempo in Abruzzo' - will the oil get through, as devastating storms wreck the Abruzzo countryside?

We're used to thinking of Italy as an enchanted place of sunshine, outdoor lunches in the shadow of some ancient monument, and sundowners round the pool.

Not this week.    The central Abruzzo region, where the olives for Stroud Green Olive Oil are grown, has been hit by devastating weather.   First blizzards, then floods.   Storms and snow have destroyed 2,700 hectares (that's 10 square miles) of vineyards in the districts of Pescara, Chieti and Teramo.   The city of Pescara is under water.

Just a few days ago, folk were in shirtsleeves, harvesting the trees.  Now the weather is so bad the Abruzzo region has called for a state of emergency.

The mountain people of Abruzzo are used to cold winters - but it's rarely this bad, or so early.  In the Majella region, where Stroud Green Olive Oil comes from, summers are baking hot, spring and autumn are balmy with pleasant days and cool evenings and.   Winter always brings snow to the mountain peaks,but rarely much to the green valleys below 600 metres or to the coastal plain.

When the snow does hit the mountains, roads are closed, cars are fitted with snow tires and chains, the roads are lined with stranded lorries and travel is difficult and hazardous - Abruzzo drivers are used to that.    On the plus side, the ski-ing can be excellent.  Two of central Italy's best ski resorts, Roccaraso and Pescocostanzo, are little more than half an hour away into the mountains from the Aventino olive groves.   It's hard to believe you can ski so far south, far from the garish tourist traps of the Italian alps.

This snowfall has been different.     The severe weather arrived in late November, after a fortnight of almost constant rain - a downpour that nearly (but not quite) put paid to the Stroud Green Olive Oil harvest.   The snow came down in sheets, blanketing the entire region from the peaks of the Gran Sasso as far as the Adriatic beaches.  The picturesque ski resort of Pescocostanzo, just over the mountains, has been transformed into an alpine-style scene weeks before the first skiers usually arrive.

But the weather has had serious implications. Blizzards have blocked roads and flattened ancient vineyards across the region.   One wine grower in Loreto Aprutino estimates he has lost half of his 50-year-old vines, the source of local Trebbiano d'Abruzzo wines.  Hundreds more hectares of the destroyed vineyards are the source of the famous Montepulciano d'Abruzzo wine, so familiar in every London Italian restaurant.

Subsequent snow melt has swollen the rivers and transformed streams into torrents cascading through houses and villages and making travel all b ut impossible.    I generally keep an eye on the Abruzzo weather from London, but I only became aware of how serious it is after seeing photographs of the lake close to Casa della Meridiana almost full to overflowing, and video of the Aventino River just a few hundred metres from the house seemingly on the point of bursting its banks - so much in spate that police closed the road bridge.

Duncan, the driver who will bring the next consignment of Stroud Green Olive Oil back to London next week, told me by phone he had been obliged to stop deliveries in Abruzzo because of the weather - 'You can't drive anywhere - roads swept away, trees down.'

The rain and snow means he has not been able to finish harvesting the olives from his own 500 olive trees, so the olives will be wasted.  On top of all that there was a further small earthquake north of L'Aquila just a couple of days ago which rattled teacups and caused alarm right actross the region.

Fortunately, Duncan expects to pick up the olive oil from the hotel basement where it is stored and bring it back to London N4, so it looks like Stroud Green Olive Oil will get through.   But my heart goes out to the kind people of Abruzzo who have lost their vines, trees, olives and livelihoods because of the weather this year.
 

It's just arrived in Stroud Green.

Words fail me.

Half an hour ago the doorbell rang.  It was Duncan, the van driver, just arrived from Italy with a very special load.   Just 24 hours ago I was still in central Italy, while Duncan was driving across France with a consignment of 13 tins of olive oil in the back.   This evening it arrived.

What an exciting moment.   The first taste!    The past four days in Italy have been so hectic and non-stop we haven't even had an opportunity to taste any of the oil, which came in sealed containers straight onto the truck.  How to describe the experience?

Just amazing.  This oil lives up to expectations.  It's a thick, luminous green the colour of melon juice, and cloudy.  It gives off a powerful aroma of grass, leaves, twigs and olive branches.  Tasting it is like sipping at some kind of slippery, velvety soup, with a slight astringency and marked peppery aftertaste.

It's so completely fresh and utterly unlike anything in a bottle off a supermarket shelf.

This is a great day.   It's the real thing.  No more to add.