Family Olives

A  family that stays together picks olives together.

It's the law of the land, family land, family olives.  Or in this case olive, single.  One olive tree in the back yard.

Our daughter's family went the whole hog and picked their olive-s this year.  You have to go the whole hog whether it's one tree or a hundred.  Out came the nets, the rakes and all the paraphernalia

Tall grandson came home for the weekend to gather the family olives  ..

I would say if that was true.  But he did help while he was here

Laying the net

A bumper crop 

Not 'bumper' enough to send to the oil press

These ones are for eating

They are picked over one by one, leaves removed, mishapen ones put aside.  

Unforunately most of them are infected with 'dako', a nasty worm which burrows into the olive.  Serious growers will spray to prevent infestation.  These olives are 100%  organic.  No sprays, no chemicals

Enough for a few bottles of home pickled olives.  First they must be soaked in water for a few days to remove the bitterness

The rest are piled under the olive tree as compost

Our neighbourhood is buzzing with olive pickers this week.  Vaso and her family have started picking and taken the first sacks to the press.  They'll be picking till well after Christmas.

Further down our road a team of Albanians are picking for a family who live in Athens and no longer come for the harvest.  The pickers receive half the oil as their 'reward' and sell it privately or sell it to the oil press.  

I went out one morning to find a friend of ours picking the olives in the field next door.  These olives are virtually abandoned but every second year they produce a heavy crop.  One of the neighbouring families picks the olives for absent owners.

The olive tree, they say,  will thrive if you leave it alone but once you start watering and giving it nutriment then you must keep on doing so.  

There are olives everywhere, even along the footpaths on Poros

Olives

We saw the first olives of this season being picked on our way out of town last week.  The olives on the island though are not quite ready.  Everyone, ie our neighbours, are waiting till the end of the month or even mid November so the crop has a chance to plump up a bit, hopefully producing more oil.  We had some very heavy rain last month which will improve the quality of the oil and the amount each olive produces

 The first olives for eating were dropped  on our table in the cafe 2 weeks ago, just a handful.  K was very pleased

These are the first black olives, and came from a plot of olives which are watered all year long and are early producers.  They are given a bash with a hammer or the back of the hand, mixed with  coarse salt and are eaten the next day.  They're a delicacy, first of the season.  

Olives usually need to be soaked in water for days on end to get rid of the bitterness but these early olives are edible immediately.  Even I tried them and liked them.

They don't last long, a week at the most

This years crop has a worm problem and many of the olives have already fallen.  The worm burrows inside and eats just below the stalk so the olive falls from the tree.  In some areas the problem has almost ruined the harvest.  Here many olives have fallen but the trees still have plenty of fruit to be picked

Next door Vaso and her daughter are mending the nets which will be spread out under the trees.  They were already cleaned at the end of last season but rocks and thistles tear holes in the material.  These have to be patched so the olives don't fall through. 

It's one helluva difficult task for these woman. Vaso is in her eighties and her daughter is a retired school teacher.  They sit there on the ground in the yard for a week with these huge nets spread around them sewing up the holes.   

The neighbourhood is preparing.  Soon there will be nets everywhere, even across our roads as branches are raked for their olives.  I hope the weather stays dry and warm for a few more weeks.  It's a hard dirty job and icy winds and wet trees make it worse.  

That golden oil at the end of it is always worth the trouble.  Family members travel back to their villages to collect olives from their land, lawyers, doctors and office workers, they all want that extra virgin olive oil which to them is the best in the world.

Real Greek Extra Virgin Olive oil

Greek olive oil.  Guaranteed to keep your skin smooth and wrinkle free and your heart  pumping regularly.  Olive oil also gives you light, keeping alight the lamps in many churches and makes a pure, green

soap.  My brother-in-law always made great blocks of this rough, green soap after the olive harvest and washed his hair with it, claiming at the age of 80 it was the soap that kept his hair from going grey. In my early years on Poros my mother-in-law washed the dishes with a block of this natural oil soap.  I hated it.  The soap would not form suds and there was an oily scum around the basin at the end.  

We pick and pickle or salt our own olives.  Serve them with lemon juice and a pool of oil so you can dip your bread.

The olive tree provides the best fire wood, slow and long burning.  This one gives shade to our car as well.  It does need a good trim though.  At the moment it hides our view of the sea and the lights of Athens.  Wild claims that boiled olive leaf tea helps cure all sorts of illnesses swept through the country a few years ago and for a short while olive leaves wrapped in plastic were even on sale in the supermarket.  Come and pick your own!  Or just continue eating the olives and the oil.

Our garage

What fresher oil than this, eaten on our terrace......

With a view of the very trees it came from.  The olive groves on the hillside opposite us.

Some of the years supply of home pickled olives.

Greek extra-virgin olive oil is now on sale in Australian supermarkets.  The same brand we can also buy in our  own local supermarket. Australia now produces a lot of its own olive oil.  The climate is very similar to ours.

An olive oil stain on your clothes can be easily removed by squirting some dish liquid on the spot and giving it a brief rub.  Bundle the garment up and throw it in the washing machine.  Gone.

The olive tree is native to the mediterranean. Traces of olive oil in jugs 4,000 years old have been found in a tomb on the greek island of Naxos.   Modern greeks have the highest per capita consumption of olive oil, 24 litres per person per year.  That is 2 litres per person every month.  Thinking about the amount of olive oil we use in salads and cooking I guess that is about right, even though we are trying to cut down. 

We also use olive oil to light the lamp on the family cemetary plot.  If you pass the graveyard at night you will see a hundred of these little lamps flickering in the dark among the graves.

There is an ancient olive tree on Crete thought to be 2 or 3,000 years old.  It has been declared a natural  monument.  It's root system is massive and enormously twisted.  Amazing.  It still produces olives.  The branches from this tree were used for the Beijing and Athens Olympics.

There is another tree in a village near Bethlehem which is thought to be between 4 and 5,000 years old.