Here are some shots of our olive picking efforts a couple of seasons ago at our place in Italy. Our good friends and neighbours, John & Christine, Fred & Barbara, very kindly turned up and helped us enormously that day and we collected a couple of cwt of olives which was turned to beautiful olive oil by the end of the day. Happy memories.
Well it’s been a lovely mild week here and it’s given us a chance to get a lot of the olives picked and processed before heading home next week. It was apparent that the fruit was ripenning quickly although up until yesterday absolutely nobody around here was picking the fruit. For the last couple of weeks we noticed that a few olives were beginning to fall from the trees. Remembering how we lost quite a bit of fruit last year through droppage (we were late harvesting because of Isobel’s illness and we couldn’t get over here earlier to pick the fruit), we decided to get on with it. I’d like to think that the sight of us up our ladders sparked a frenzy of activity because everybody’s started picking now. It’s humbling to be viewed as Il Duce of the Olive Groves. Ha!
Pasta Paulie 