The Olive Harvest
I am thrilled to report that we managed to complete our olive harvest last week and take our load to get pressed. As usual D and I had a guess the weight competition and as usual my more optimistic guess won. We picked 130kg of olives which gave us a 13 litres of delicious, thick, peppery olive oil.
Although I did grumble a little at the start of this process by the end I had totally entered into the swing of things. My main gripe had been that taking 2 weeks off work in order to create 13 litres of oil (with an optimistic cash value of about €40) does not make good financial sense, and I’m all about making good financial sense. It was pointed out to me though that you could say that about anything – cooking, growing food, making clothes even making Christmas decorations. Why do any of it when we can buy it all from Lidl? After that I stopped whining and got on with it. On Friday night I had that warm glow of someone who has just completed a project successfully that they’ve been working on for a while. Love that feeling.
Here is our car laden down with our spoils:
Here is the fruit of our two week labour:
This isn’t quite the end though of our olive harvest because I still have to deal with making olives for eating. The oil part of the project is officially over though for this year. At the weekend I celebrated this victory by enjoying tomato bruschetta drizzled in it, salads drenched in it and roasted veg cooked in it too. I can confirm it tastes better than the oil bought from Lidl.
photo credit and interesting article about benefits of olive oil
My name is CB, a twenty nine year old attempting to renovate a crumbling Portuguese farmhouse into a beautiful home and thriving smallholding. There is considerable work needed both indoors and out to create the gorgeous and productive home I have in mind but I do love a good challenge. 
