Saint Spiridon Blog

The life and times of an olive farmer (and his wife!) For the uninitiated, “Akoma?” is Greek for “still?” We got to hear “akoma?” an awful lot from our neighbouring farmers and friends as our harvesting, begun on December 11^th, dragged on through January and finally ended, with a groan and a whimper, on February 4^th.

At the beginning of December, as our first harvest approached, we were full of uncertainty, indecision - and our usual lack of planning. Our first harvest. Should we hire labour, or do it ourselves? Could we do it ourselves? Which nets should we buy, and how many? Should we bag the olives up in sacks, or get the new fangled plastic boxes? What generator should we buy to power the picking sticks? Which picking sticks should we buy? Where should we get our olives pressed, and how should we go about that? What colour should the olives be when you pick them? How long have we got before the wind blows them off the trees? And so on and so on.

We began with the generator. Fortunately, the guy in the shop spoke reasonable English and was someone we’d met a year ago at our first “Kazarni”. Lord only knows what impression he’d gained of us. Anyway, we took his advice and plumped for the “Robin”, relatively inexpensive, everybody uses them, they don’t go wrong. “Robin”, as we naturally call him, burbles along merrily all day without a hitch, is easy to start and economical to run. He’s not so big and heavy as some of the others we’d looked at, which we later discovered was a true blessing.

From the same chap we bought the picking “sticks”. The more usual stick, about 2 metres long with a rotating crosspiece on the end with 15cm nylon flails, whizzes around and beats the olives into submission, knocking them down onto the nets spread out around the tree. Alas, they also beat the leaves off, leaving the tree with a recovery job to do. We chose instead a new type which looks about the same, but at the ends of the crosspiece a sort of globe of stiff rubber fingers sticks out. They spin, but as soon as they meet resistance in the tree they reverberate back and forth, shaking and knocking the olives off but mercifully almost no leaves. They arouse a great deal of interest from other farmers, such that we’ve been stopped in the street quite a few times for an opinion on them, expressed with much sign language of course.

We bought six 12 x 6 metre nets (not enough , but at c. 50 Euro a throw we resented the idea of buying more) and in the end opted for sacks, because everyone else does and at 60 lepta each they were a give away compared to 6.50 Euro for the boxes which held only half the weight.

So , we were (nearly) kitted up. I say nearly , because it’s only after you’ve picked a few trees that you realise that an olive, travelling at c.40 km/h straight into your eye is not funny. Safety glasses!

The first of our groves we’d elected to pick has about 200 trees, 40 of them very small but the rest too big and overgrown. The grove runs on a steep slope for two thirds of its length, then terraces form the last third. Access for the pick-up consists of a place to park at the top, and a muddy track at the bottom which we’d made earlier in the year and which ,if there’s been no rain, lets you get about half way up. This, we realised quickly, is key information. If you’re fifty metres from the truck and it’s uphill, everything you pick has to go on your back at the end of the day. Now we know how Sherpas feel.

Our little routine for each day went as follows: Up at 7.15, we first walk out onto our balcony in Sitia and look up the valley to where our land can be seen and check it’s not raining. If it is, then it’s back to bed (hurrah!), if not Anne makes the tea, makes up the flasks and our elevenses (toast with olive oil for me, marmalade for her) and our picnic lunch. I moan and groan, drink tea and smoke until I feel human. If Anne hadn’t been there cracking the whip half the harvest would have rotted on the trees. Then it’s cart the sticks and bags down to the pick-up. We keep “Robin” in the front seat over night, so he has to be hauled out and tied up in the back. I did suggest at one time that it would save me a lifting job if Anne would ride in the back of the truck, but for some reason she told me to “go away”!

Tie the sticks in, check we’ve got petrol in the can for “Robin”, and off we go. Fifteen minutes drive brings us to the spring where we stop and fill up our water bottles for the day, then 3 minutes more and we’re there. Unload “Robin”, the sticks and the water and lunch stuff and carry heave and pull it all to where we’d left the nets the previous day and we’re ready to start.

Our very first day of picking started with a shock. When you buy your nets they come wrapped in a tight bale, deceptively heavy. We’d left the bale on the grove the day before in the wheelbarrow on the steep slope where we were due to start. On arrival that morning I’d climbed out of Hank (the pick-up!) and gone to the spot. The barrow was lying on it’s side. The nets had gone.

“We’ve been robbed!” I shouted. (I’ve deleted several less than savoury words here for the benefit of our more sensitive readers) “ Some (body) has stolen our nets. 300 Euro down the drain.” My good wife , ever the calming influence, simply looked around and pointed to the bale of nets 50 metres down the hill. During the night the barrow had decided that gravity was right after all and it ought to fall over, the bale following the same argument and rolling down the hill.

After lugging them back up the hill we unpacked and set out the nets, learning almost immediately that a) this is harder than it looks, especially on sloping, wet and weedy ground, b) that getting the nets right is absolutely vital or you’ll lose half of what you pick, and c) that dew-damp ground turns into a ski slope once a net’s on it. From then on we each of us fell over at least once a day. How we survived without a sprain or a fracture we’ll never know. A laugh when it happens, though.

We started “Robin”, connected our picker wires to the terminals and got stuck in. 8 hours later we’d picked about 75 kilos of olives. Two days later we’d picked four full sacks. We did get quicker!

For anyone thinking of losing their wits and trying olive farming for fun or profit (ha!) please, before you buy, look closely at the steepness of the land and the access for your vehicle. I carry half sacks of olives (about 30 kilos) to the pick up. The distance averages about 40 metres but at times has been 70 metres, straight uphill. The first trip is bad enough. If you’ve picked 8 half sacks in a day and have to heave and pull a generator over the same bumpy ground it all becomes something of a trial.

A few days before we’d started we’d made arrangements with an olive press where, as luck would have it, the office is managed by the lovely Maria, who speaks great English. The press is ideal for us. With their modern “Alfa Laval” machinery they can batch process even small amounts of olives (so our oil isn’t mixed with anyone else’s) and they’re getting certified to process organic olives, for which we’re heading . Our first batch for pressing, a measly four sacks marked as ours with a spray painted orange “W” on each sack , looked pathetic and lonely stacked on a pallet under the lemon tree which became “our” spot at the press. Everyone else seemed to turn up with a pick-up ridiculously overloaded , with 20 or 30 sacks flattening the suspension. Needless to say, we felt pretty small beer in this company.

The atmosphere at the press is, generally, pretty grumpy. Possibly because this is a poor year for olives, more likely because when you go to the press after a hard days picking you’ve hardly the energy to smile. And, like small farmers the world over, all the farmers know that they’ll make virtually nothing for their efforts, the real profit lying much further up the food chain. For us, being the oddity of being English amongst an almost exclusively old-Greek-farmer-family-been-here-for-generations crowd, perhaps it was worse. “They’ll get used to us in 20 or 30 years” I said, to encourage Anne.

The pressing process began with our olives being tipped into the big hopper then carried on the conveyor belt to a blower that separated the leaves, then into a bath for a wash, then weighed in another hopper, then piped into the first part of the press where they were mashed up and churned. After about 40 minutes we lifted the lid on the churning machine. Puddles of bright green olive oil had begun to appear. When ready, the pulp was piped to a separator that took out the solids, then piped to a centrifuge from whence the oil appeared. Our excitement mounted as the process went on until, moment of moments, our incredibly luminous bright green cloudy oil emerged from the pipes. A year’s hard graft had gone into this moment. The acidity, we learned was well below 0.3, the best of extra virgin oils. The taste, we found out that evening, was sublime. We’d lucked out in buying, before we knew anything about olives, trees that produce olives which produce a kilo of great oil from every 4.5 kilos of olives picked. It can be as low as 10 to one.

Of course, what began as an exciting and daunting leap into the unknown quickly became a drudgery, an effort, and back-achingly hard work. We picked only on dry days, sometimes managing only half a day but rarely breaking for more than 20 minutes for our picnic lunch. There are of course compensations. It’s cheaper and more healthy than joining a gym. Our groves, high up the valley side, give commanding views across the incredibly green valley of olive groves, interspersed with stately spires of Cypress and the clustered white houses of villages clinging to the hillside opposite. To the left the mountains gain in altitude and majesty as they head for the south coast, to the right the valley sweeps down for 8 kilometres to Sitia and the sea, of which we have a nice view. We can hear other families picking their olives right across the valley, we get beeped at by all the farmers that drive past on the “main” road (one vehicle every half hour!). Otherwise, it’s just us , the birdsong, the plaintive calls of the buzzards riding a thermal overhead, the sunshine and a pervading sense of peace and serenity that seems to inhabit this place, occupied and farmed for 6000 years.

We don’t, by the way, know most of the farmers that beep their horns. But we know they know of us. The village grapevine of gossip means they all know we’re the crazy English. They’ll know who we bought the groves from, for how much, what our trees are like, how we measure up in farming terms. In a kindly way they’re watching over us, dropping hints and tips when we meet, making suggestions, giving praise where due, surprising us with their intimate knowledge of every inch of our groves. A lot of youngsters locally can’t wait to get away from the lives their parents have lived. We guess it’s nice for them to see people coming here who can appreciate it for what it is.

By February the fourth it was no longer “Akoma?” but “Telios!”, The End! We’d stuck it out, and with a little help from our friends (especially the stalwart Danny) we’d picked 4,600 kilos of olives, and pressed just over a 1000 kilos of oil. For those of a mathematical turn of mind, that’s 153 x 30 kilo sacks hauled up the slopes. We’ve hardly argued at all, laughed a lot, and only fallen out of one tree.

Emai Agrotis

The life and times of an olive farmer (and his wife!)

You will remember, if you read the first instalment ,how in June last year we fell in love with a beautiful valley here in East Crete and how in very short order we were buying a chunk of it.

Or to be precise, five chunks of it .

Through our sales agent we had been introduced to a smashing young chap who, like many of the younger generation here, was losing interest in living in a small mountain village farming the land and was more interested in a business in the big city (or Sitia in this case) and sports cars rather than donkeys. So, after a small amount of negotiation a sale was agreed and the “Topographical Engineer” instructed to make a plan of the land.

If you’ve not yet been through the buying process there are a number of pitfalls awaiting the unwary, especially since there is little in the way of a land registry here in Greece. One of the essentials is to get a topography made, preferably using GPS technology, and to ensure that the neighbours agree with the lines the topographer is drawing. Of course , it also helps if the chap selling you the land has a firm knowledge himself of what he owns! His level of disinterest seemed pretty high and on two occasions we had to call in “Dad” to tell the topographer where the lines should be drawn. “Dad” knows every tree and every bump in the ground for miles around, who owns what and probably what they’re worth.

We sat down that first night, mad fools that we were, and dreamt our dreams of an easy life watching trees grow and getting paid for it.

We also tried to name each of the five plots of olives so that we could conveniently refer to them in the future. There were “the terraces”, but then there were “the other terraces”, there was “the house plot” where we’d like to build our own house. But then we changed our mind about where we’d like to build our own house. Twice. Argued about it. And this, bear in mind, before we had the wherewithal to build a house anyway. There was “the little plot”, and that name has stuck. There was “the first big terraced plot by the road” which has now become “the pruned plot” , because it’s a much shorter name and, as I’ll describe later in this series, there was just a little bit of pruning to do. So now the trees are much shorter too.

There was the awkward plot for which no name suggested itself . It’s now called the “new house plot”. Not because that’s where we’d like to build ourselves, but because we noticed that the topography showed the plot as about 3000 square meters, but the original contract of the guy selling us the land showed it as much larger. “Dad” was called in, another topography made, and “Oh yeah, there’s the valley as well as the bit with the olives on”. The valley made the overall size 6,000 square meters , and as you can build on anything over 4,000 the plot had moved from being non-buildable to buildable. Hence “New House Plot”. “Dad” is the father of the guy that sold us the olive trees. When we first met he seemed a little frosty, but as we have spent more time working the land so we have got to know him as a generous and kind soul, always ready to offer advice and help and the hardest man to buy a drink for, as he’s already bought the round.

Of course we’d never build on the “New House Plot” anyway. The trees are far too nice and we’ve been introduced now, and shared hugs when no locals were watching, so it would be rude to chop them down just to build a house.

This type of lunatic tree loving stuff tends to overtake you when you realise that some of the trees you have are well over a hundred and fifty years old. Cutting them down would be like stabbing your granny. We are only custodians of our trees, taking care of them for future generations.

Emai Agrotis

The life and times of an olive farmer (and his wife!)

Three years ago I had absolutely no idea that by November 2007 I would have been living in Crete for over a year and a half, that I’d wake up to the sight and sound of the sea each morning, that I’d be seriously considering buying a donkey because, of all things, I’d become an olive farmer.

Back then in the UK our son had left uni and effectively left home, our daughter was at uni but was probably the most travelled and independent kid in the world. We could cut the apron strings and fly.

I was desperate to get out of the place before I went mad. Or got mad. Perhaps it was all the security cameras? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you has always been my adage.

Other than wanting to escape, I had no fixed plans……..

The first job was to browbeat the wife, God bless her long suffering soul, into joining me in my insanity. “The kids are grown up “, the argument went, “lets go on an adventure. Sell all this rubbish we’ve managed to surround ourselves with and go to India and buy a tea plantation, go to Italy and do up old houses, something, anything other than another 15 years of this until we retire, then a few years weeing into a chair and dribbling in some care home until we die At which time Tony Blair or whichever cloned fascist is in power at the time will tax us again“. Of course, I had to repeat myself a few times.

Eventually, she bought it. If only, I suspect, to get a little peace.

Years ago we used to dream of going to France. Learnt the lingo, cruised the internet for old farmhouses for £500 to renovate, took our holidays with Eurocamp Then we realised that every other Brit was doing the same, Brittany was becoming “Little Britainy” and the French, quite rightly, were getting fed up of “les rosbifs.” And La Belle France ,as the years progressed ,was becoming more and more like the UK anyway. So where?

Like so many of the friends we have here in Crete we sold everything we had, went through the trauma of a major life laundry (“I’m not selling my sofas!“) put a few books and photographs (and the kitchen table our kids had grown up sitting around and painting on) in the back of a van and set off.

Unlike those friends , although we had a vague idea we were heading for Crete we weren’t certain. Mostly because we’d never set foot here. Indeed the only experience of Greece we had was a week in Kephalonia some years back, and then only my wife and the kids went. So the future was a little hazy.

I won’t bore you with details of the road trip because I guess if you’re reading this you’ve probably done the same or similar. What I will say is that when we emerged from the ferry at Souda bay we were still talking. But only just.

The van, by this time, had become “Michael”. We’d decorated him with flowers on the basis that if thieves thought it was a hippy van they wouldn’t bother trying to steal the contents. He was terrifically, dangerously and almost certainly illegally overloaded, creaked and groaned around every bend, lurched frighteningly at every rut in the road, and became our best and most loyal friend.

Of course Crete did everything it could to put us off right from the start. We couldn’t have felt less welcome if we’d parachuted in with the 31^st Sturmabteilung (or whatever) in 1942. The wind was giving the island some serious attention, it was raining and cloudy, the roads were full of potholes, everyone was honking their horns when they passed Michael (which we thought was some sort of aggressive behaviour at the time) and when we got to Iraklion we were greeted with a fifty meter long pile of stinking rubbish in the street. We were getting to the point of turning back at this stage. What we didn’t know, of course, is that the rubbish was due to a strike by the collectors (this was April 06). We thought it was usually like that. Oh my God, what had we done?

We pointed Michael in the direction of Sitia on a whim and because we’d read there were already lots of Brits in the West of the island and what would be the point of joining them. If we did that we might end up playing golf, or spending our evenings in Brit pubs drinking Tetley, watching Corrie and eating sausage and mash. Heaven forefend, although the sausage and mash sounds good.

I’m sorry , by the way, if you play golf and go to the Red Lion every night. It’s just not for me..

It’s worth noting at this stage that the better half has long held an entirely unwarranted hatred of Wales. All those dark, lowering mountains. The rain. Dark little villages. I’ve grown to dislike the place myself. If you’ve ever had occasion to travel from Agios Nikolaos to Sitia on a dismal and rainy April evening you’ll know what I ’m driving at. Needless to say, things were a bit grim in the van. Michael was making the best job he could of pulling 3.5 tonnes up steep mountain roads round S bend after S bend without grumbling, trying to keep our spirits up.We drove into Sitia down the Iraklion road, not it’s prettiest aspect, took one look and kept going.

We carried on further east to Palekastro.

Now, you know when you go into the wrong pub and everything goes eerily quiet and all eyes are focussed on little old you? That’s how we felt driving through the square in Palekastro in our hippied-up van. Everyone stared at us . It was more than a little unnerving. Still, it was late and we had to find a bed for the night. Wearily and miserably we booked into the Hellas hotel in the square in Palekastro and went to bed. I can’t remember if we talked or not, but things were decidedly other than great. (Many times since we’ve been sitting in the square enjoying a beer with people who have become friends and we’ve stared at people passing through. It’s what you do.)

Isn’t it funny what a bit of sunshine can do to the spirits? The next morning the big friendly chap in the sky beamed down on us and all seemed to be just that little bit better. Oddly, it’s been pretty much a little bit better every day since.

We met an English musician who makes ends meet selling houses and who, in chronological order, became our third friend in Crete. This , in hindsight, was the beginning of the process that led to me thinking four hours on a steep mountainside hacking at huge “weeds” in the blazing sun was a time well spent and fun too! I recall thinking “Hey, we could probably afford a few olive trees…..”

The “fellow-escapees” we come across in our neck of the woods tend to fall into three categories:

Category a)… Great big chunk of cash in the bank and a nice pension ,thanks very much.

Category b)… As above, but with a less than great chunk of cash.

Category c) …, as b), but without the pension.

We, most decidedly, fall into category c). So, as we became more familiar with what was available for what sort of money we had to think of some way to add to our little all by way of generating an income. Two options offered themselves. Option one, buy an old house, renovate and restore it, sell it for a healthy profit and do it all again. There are still lots of empty old houses here in East Crete and in fact doing this sort of thing had long been in my mind. In fact nearly all of our English friends are doing just that. Option two; buy a few olive trees and at the same time make sure that the land is build-able on and in a spot where people might like to live , then sell off-plan as we sure can’t afford to build them first.

One day in June 06 we were gently motoring around the area and we happened upon the most beautiful valley close to a hamlet called Agios Spiridon. Studded with stately cypress trees, majestic mountain tops in the distance, white villages clinging to the hillsides, the sea glinting in the distance, buzzards idling on a thermal overhead and the greenest place we’d seen in Crete. We fell in love. Funnily enough, just a week or two later we were there again, buying 750 dilapidated olive trees and our own slice of heaven. This was surely no coincidence. Find me an English couple in love with the idea of being an olive farmer and I’ll find you a Spanish, Italian or Greek olive farmer willing to let you find out the hard way just why it is they all live to be a hundred. It’s the exercise, and they‘d rather you did it whilst they use your cash to get a widescreen tv and visit their grandson and his family in New York.

As I guess most readers will know, buying a property in Crete is a journey rather than a transaction. We’ve been farming the groves since January this year, but for various reasons only got the paperwork finally right last week! Over the coming issues I’ll be sharing with you some of the joys of Olive farming, just in case any of you are mad enough to follow suit, and some of the joys of Greek bureaucracy , in case you didn’t know. We are farming biologically, and will share what little learning we have with Crete Courier readers.

Panta geia, panta xara as they say in Agios Spiridon, “Always health, always joy”.