Harvesting olives and making olive oil

For the first time, we have Extra Virgin Organic Olive oil picked directly from our farm. It was a lot of work and we had a lot of help but in the end, we have almost a years supply of olive oil for the farm.

Apart from actually picking olives, we had to prune the olive trees earlier in the year. This was to encourage the tree to grow as we wanted it to. Our 40 olive trees are located in various places around the farm, some are old and some we planted. The older ones needed a heavy prune as they have been left alone for many years. Following this, we had to clear the grass, brambles and other plants from under the trees to give us access to harvest.

Do you want to help with the Olive harvest – click here for volunteering info

Olive picking — You need to place nets around the trees to catch the olives, this is why we don’t plant guilds around our olive trees in the food forest as access to the trees would be too limited. This photo is from when we helped our neighbour.

harvesting olives — Group effort at our neighbour’s olive grove

Cheese and wine breaks keep us going throughout the day

harvested olives — One days worth of olive picking with 10 people gave us around 16 litres of olive oil. So we had to do many more days as we used 125 litres of oil last year at Keela Yoga Farm

seperating olives — Once we have harvested the olives we have to separate the leaves from the olives to get a purer olive oil

olive harvest — This is the whole harvest that we collected with an average of 10 people per day over 16 days. This gave a total of 1500kg of olive oil which made around 150 litres of olive oil. THe quality of the olives and the time they are harvested can drastically increase or decrease the amount of oil that you receive. All the olives go into transparent bags to then go to the lugar (olive oil press)

olive mill — At the lugar they load the olives into the mill. These giant stone wheels spin and crush the olives into a paste

Olive oil press — The olive paste then gets spread around this round fabric and then many of them are piled up like a huge stack of pancakes ready for pressing. These then go into a machine where they get compressed and an oil drips out

Seperating oil from water — After pressing, the oil is added into the water tank which separates the water from the oil, the oil floats and get sent out the pipe

Thank you to everyone that let us harvest their trees, to whoever planted the olive trees on our farm many years ago and to everyone that helped us pick the olives this year. We had a great team of volunteers and friends. Now we can at least be sustainble in our olive oil usage.

Would you like a holiday with us picking olives, doing yoga and working in the garden in November 2019? If yes then please take a look at our volunteering page.

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