The Stroud Green Olive Oil harvest - day one

We've started picking - the dawn of a day with blue sky and no rain meant we were able to get the Stroud Green Olive Oil harvest under way at Casa della Meridiana yesterday.  Hooray!  

In the course of about five hours, we harvested five trees and picked 120 kilos of beautiful, luscious green and black olives, before another rainstorm stopped play.    We tok the freshly-harvested fruit straight to an olive mill up the valley, for processing.  Here's my step-by-step guide to a special Extra Virgin day in pictures:

1.  The team:  Ben, Peter, Mike and Bobbie, plus tools of the trade -  ladder, secateurs and shears, saws, hand-held olive rakes, and old clothes.

2. The net and hand rake.  Spread the enormous nylon net around each tree, then rake off the green and black olives into it.   Very, very satisfying and compulsive.   Cutting down high branches to bring down the fruit is smart, since the tree has to be drastically pruned anyway. 

3. High-level picking.  Don't tell Health and Safety.

4.  Ground crew.    Now you pour the olives from the net into special crates, which let in air so the olives won't spoil.   Yesterday's harvest yielded seven crates.

5.  Scheduled break.  Not tea.

6.  At t'mill.  This frantoio (olive mill) is run by a co-operative in the nearby village of Piana La Roma.   It has a very modern centrifuge press.   We'll gradually try out all the local mills to find the best quality and cleanest.

7.  Weighed i.  This is Ben with 120 kilos of newly picked olives, behind him some of the scores of crateloads of olives similarly waiting to be pressed. We'll pick up the oil tomorrow or the day after.

8.  Ready for pressing.  Here they measures olives in quintali - a quintale is 100kilos - and our labours today yielded 1.2 quintali in the local jargon.  This is a good crop.  

It looks like we'll harvest nearly 3 quintali this year, about 30 litres or more of good 'Stroud Green Special Reserve' extra virgin oil from our own trees.  We have seven olive trees to go, so we'll finish the job as soon as the weather dries up again.

But now we've got some hard decisions to make.  

It's Saturday - and it's raining again.  By mid day, we'll have to decide whether to go with what we've got, and have the first half pressed, or wait for better weather forecast for tomorrow and try to harvest the rest.  There's always the risk of the olives spoiling.   No wonder farmers are always watching the weather.