Olive Oil Harvesting – One Year

15

Saturday 20 December, 2014 by Uncle Spike

In the preceding four part series, we looked at, preparing for, harvesting and processing olives to make our olive oil. But what was the end result like? Well, here is an end-to-end overview…

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Olive tree flower buds

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Olive tree blossom

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Baby olives

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Maturing olives

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Grown-up olives

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Harvesting

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Maturing and bagging

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Processing

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** OLIVE OIL **

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First of all, the glass on the left is new oil’ and is therefore still a little cloudy. I’ll leave that at least two months before selling any from that batch. Comparatively, the glass on the right is from last year’s harvest.

You may also note how green the oil is compared to the commercial stuff. This year it was a mixed harvest, with around 15% of the fruit still green by the time we got to the factory. Much of my trees are still 50% green when I harvest, but they ‘mature’ even when waiting in that huge pile for up to six weeks (if regularly and liberally salted).

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