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.
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