Back At It

We were back to work today, although somewhat different; now we are harvesting the olives. Neither of us have experience but we were eager to learn, so we headed out to the orchards at 8am and jumped right into it. We picked up the process fairly quickly. You work as a team and lay nets underneath the trees, then you take handheld rakes and brush the olives off the branches onto the ground. Once the trees are clear, everyone pulls the sides of the nets and walks in together, bringing all the olives into a pile that's easy to dump in a crate. One crate (approx. 40 lbs) is about a 750ml bottle of olive oil! (On average, a tree produces about 1-2 crates; we picked 20 today and the crop is less than normal.) From the little oil the olives produce to the incredible manual labor needed to harvest the olives, we now understand why a good olive oil can be so expensive.

We worked all day, but it went by quickly and the work was rewarding to see and hear all the olives dropping from the branches. It's almost therapeutic. Heading back out tomorrow!






- Martin & Kate

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Location:Via delle Grillaie,Greve in Chianti,Italy