The Olive Harvest
by Arlene Bernstein

We always set the alarm clock for the morning of olive harvest, but it’s never really necessary, because anticipatory excitement works much better than any mechanical gadget.   This year the weather was perfect.  Clear blue sky, the embracing warmth of a golden autumn sun, the kind of day that any football fan would consider a gift of the gods, bringing hopes of victory. 

Pickers arrived and fashioned rope straps on their buckets to hang around their necks, allowing both hands free.  We had examples of fruit fly damage to show them and asked them not to pick the damaged fruit.  You can see an exit hole of the olive fruit fly larva that has left a trail of bacterial and fungal rot on its way out.  The pinprick entrance hole of the fly itself doesn’t present a problem. 

Each tree still had a 1 ½ liter plastic soda pop bottle hanging in it, with an opaque slurry of water and tortula yeast tablets in the bottom and holes punched in the top.  The idea was to attract the fly and foil its life cycle.  We tried two other methods as well, and we aren’t really sure which worked, but fortunately one did. Our neighbors, who have organized a cooperative for people who don’t have enough olives to run separately at the olive oil press, had to call off their picking, as the fruit fly damage was above the acceptable limit.  I joined their picking crew last year, just for fun, and we worked all day in pouring rain. That makes me doubly grateful for this year’s sunshine.

So, victorious already just for having olives to pick, we sent off  the crew into the shimmer of silver green leaves to strip off the green, rose and black fruit.  I headed into the landscape, where I had planted a dozen or so trees I propogated from  little cuttings, beginning them in perlite and sand  only four years ago.  I got over half a bucket from the area around the vegetable garden. Then I headed for the landscaping around the swimming pool.  What was I thinking when I tucked those baby trees in among the rosa chinensa mutabilis, tri colored roses that can grow as large as a small tree without pruning???  It was very sticky business to even enter the tangle.  And since these trees hadn’t been in the fly eradication program, I saw how much damage a microscopic little creature can do to the efforts of  we mortals who think we may be getting the best of them.  After spending way too much time sorting for the sound fruit among the spoiled, I decided to use my energies elsewhere and vowed to remove either the olives or the roses from the exuberance of the landscape growth next time I have strong young garden help.

The grape bins estimated to hold half a ton each were slowly filling as the sun rose in the sky, embracing us with encouragement.  By noon it was clear that my husband Michael had grossly underestimated the crop.  We were guessing almost a ton in the two bins in Albert’s pickup. By 1pm we were all hungry and there were still four rows of Italian trees, all laden. Now Michael was getting excited that the bin in Manuel’s pickup would have enough Italian variety olives to keep separate and he could realize his dream to compare two oils made from  our property, Manzanillo, a Spanish variety, side by side with the Italian. By 2pm everyone had converged on the last half dozen trees animating them with chatter and movement.  By 2:30 we were all starving and exhausted as the last olives filled the Italian bin and off Michael and Manuel went to the Olive Press in Glen Ellen. Their high tech line receives the olives on one end and sends the oil out the other in less than two hours.

It wasn’t always that way.  Our first harvest, we loaded up our pickup with 320 lbs of olives and drove to Tracy, where Frank Figone had a small traditional press set up on his grandfather’s property.  We dumped our picking boxes into what looked very much like a stemmer crusher in a winery, and then little hammers crushed the olives to a paste, or pasta, as it is called.  Frank then spread a layer of this pasta onto each of several woven mats that stacked onto a hydrolic press.  It takes about one hundred times the pressure to extract oil from the paste than it does to extract wine from the grape must.  We watched in awe as the pressure built and little beads of oil began to drip from the edges of the mats along with the water extracted from the fruit.   The liquid collected and was then sent through a centrifuge to separate the oil from the water.  The bitterness in olives is in the water.  It goes down the drain, and out the spigot comes a tentative stream of gold.  New oil!  We caught some of the droplets on a spoon and felt its unctuous texture on our tongues.  It was smooth and spicy and peppery all at once, and delicious. Contrary to the process of making wine, making olive oil is almost instant gratification.

But then there was the cleanup…my memory of making olive oil the traditional way is cold and wet.  Peeling the spent pasta  cake off the mats ( I always took it home for compost in the veggie garden, like grape pomace from the wine press), washing everything down carefully and starting over with the next batch.   The second year our trees yielded more than double and we worked all day for 34 litres of oil.  This years’ crop yielded 108 litres in less than 3 hours!

As the days shorten towards winter, we’ll bottle the oil.  It is our way of preserving summer sunshine.

Arlene Bernstein, author of Growing Season, Life Lessons from the Garden.
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