Archive for the ‘Olive Harvest’ Category

Akoma…still picking!

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

The life and times of an Olive Farmer (and his wife!)If you have been following our story so far you’ll know that our first harvest dragged on far longer than we had expected. As soon as it had been picked and pressed we decided to take “a day or two” off as a well deserved rest and review what work we still have to do before summer. Certain natural cut-offs dictate the farmers’ calendar here in Crete. For example , it’s important to get the fertiliser down well before it stops raining*, otherwise it won‘t get washed in. Additionally, you should do any pruning and major weed removal projects by the same time so that the resulting heaps of wood and weeds can be safely burned off. Fires are banned here after the last day of April , and when you recall the disaster in mainland Greece last year it’s easy to understand this precaution.(*Explanatory note for our readers on holiday from England: “Before it stops raining” means that the water that comes from the sky stops doing so for about six months or so! You can arrange to have a barbecue, no worries!)

I say “a day or two“, but in reality very little work has been done since the harvest finished on February the 4th, mostly on account of “Ooh, my back” and “Blimey, my hands“. The back, after 20 years of having to do nothing very much other than hold my head and shoulders up, naturally objected to being suddenly treated like some sort of Navvy and required to do some manual work for a change. It went on a very painful strike. The hands, similarly insulted, came out in sympathy. Each night they seize up into claws which have to be unbent , painfully , each morning. I guess it’s the muscles going into some sort of spasm. When you see an old Cretan olive farmer hobbling to his beat-up old pick-up, now you know why he’s hobbling, (and remember to say hello, it could be me!)

Anne , who is obviously made of sterner stuff than I, has been sympathetic and handy with the back soothing creams (I can recommend something called Counterpain even though it sounds like something you used to throw over the bed). Being a fairly senior nurse by previous profession she‘s pretty good at telling the patient to behave, sit up straight, get back into bed etc in that particular “you‘ll do as you‘re told“ kind of voice that they must teach them at nursing school. So with Matron in charge and my natural inclination to be a complete wuss when in the slightest pain we’ve managed little of what we should have.

All plants like a bit of fertiliser and Olive trees are no exception. Fertilising is a word that’s always conjured certain images, and now we get to fertilise 750 times a year! The technique is simple: First load up your pick-up with as many 25 kg sacks of nitrogen-with-boron and 30 kg sacks of phosphor as you’ll need for the day. Go “ouch” for a bit. Drive to the groves, unload the bags at a fairly inconvenient place and then carry them 50 meters to where you’re going to start. Go “aarrghh”! Once there, wait for the pain to stop, then tip the nitrogen into the wheelbarrow and put the phosphor, in its bag, on top. Slit the top of the phosphor bag, and you’re ready to go. Stop for a breather and a bit of a rub, and whimper quite a lot like a big kid.

Some of the more observant readers will have spotted that the bags are carried to the wheelbarrow, and not put in the barrow at the van and wheeled to where needed. Well, I can only say that you have to try each method personally before deciding which suits you best. Over rough ground ,uphill ,with a heavy barrow believe me, carrying the stuff is easier, (at least until you’re at the dispensing stage, trundling 5 meters at a time from tree to tree.)

To dispense the fertiliser, take 2.5 kilos of nitrogen-with-boron (in an old saucepan that you just happened to know would be ideal for the job when you were packing your few belongings together and leaving Blighty) and 1 kilo of phosphor, (I recommend an old Greek yoghurt pot for the purpose), bend down and walk in a circle under the branches of the tree ,sprinkling as you go. If the tree’s on a slope, sprinkle a bit more at the top than at the bottom. Be careful the tree doesn’t get romantic during this fertilising and give you a kiss. A kiss from an olive tree consists of it deliberately stretching out a sturdy branch and clouting you firmly on the head with it. Anne seems to get away with very few kisses, but in my blundering I usually pick up one or two a day. Follicly challenged as I am this means of course that my head is always covered in scratches, scabs and bumps. A kind of arboreal love-bite. I wonder ,therefore, if our trees are female rather than male? And how do you find out the sex of a tree anyway? Before we started this craziness I didn’t even know that trees could be either male or female. What’s that all about?

A side-note about organic fertiliser. It’s made from Guano (dried bird poo , to be as polite as I know our readers will expect ), dried blood, and the leftovers from fish processing factories. You’re right, it absolutely stinks. Stinks of what it’s made from. Each night we’d drive home with Hank’s windows fully open, (Hank is our pick-up), pray we didn’t meet anyone between parking Hank and getting upstairs to our apartment, strip down to our undies on the landing (not sexy, not with that smell) and leave the clothes outside the front door to ward off evil spirits. We’d fight over who gets in the shower first. Scrub exposed skin parts several times vigorously to get rid of the stink. Wash our hair four times (in my case, not a big job!) and still sometimes a lingering whiff can be had! It must be good for the trees, as my Dad always reckoned fertiliser has to pong to be any good.

Because of the length of time it took to get the harvest in and then the dodgy back and hands we were late with the fertilising. In fact, as I write we’re getting the first rain we’ve had since putting the fertiliser down. If it doesn’t rain, it doesn’t get soaked in and 6 days’ work and 600 Euro will blow away in the summer wind. We reckon we need another 8 days rain to do the job properly, and there’s little chance of that. To help, our mates are washing their cars and cleaning their windows , which is powerful rain generating voodoo. I’m trying to persuade Anne to strip naked and do a rain dance, but regrettably so far without success. I don’t know if rain dancing requires nudity, but it certainly sounds like it might and it would be considerably more entertaining that way.

Back permitting, we’ve been doing a bit of pruning on the large, old, uncared for trees that form the majority of our stock. Really, they need the big “rejuvenation” prune, cutting them right back and flattening their profile to a workable height. However, this year’s harvest should be a heavy one relative to last year’s ,so we’re reluctant to give it up by doing the big cut. The problem with most of the trees is that they haven’t been trimmed at all in about ten years. The outer profile is rounded and inside the tree looks like someone has gone mad with a dead- twig-making-machine just for fun. The riotous proliferation of these useless twigs slowed us down considerably at harvest time, having to fight through them to get at the olives. They have to go.

Between half an hour and two hours with the trusty pruning saw and the “Felco Professional Number 7” secateurs (the best, especially for those with dodgy hands) and all the dead, dying, and useless twiggy festoonery is gone. The tree is transformed internally, lots more light can get through (which is important) and the branches which will carry this year’s harvest are now easy to get at. The yield should improve, as the tree would otherwise expend energy maintaining this useless wood, and the next harvest should be a relatively easy affair. So, 12 trees done so far, 230 trees to prune, other jobs to do , the end of April as a deadline. You’re right, we’ve got no chance!

In the next day or so we’re expecting delivery of our grape vines. A few years ago I was fortunate enough to work for an organisation where money was no object when it came to entertainment and it was at that time that I discovered “Barolo” wine, normally far outside my £4.99 a bottle maximum budget. (In this case, £60 outside! My current hooch of choice is local Raki at 6 euro for a litre and a half. How times change…) “Barolo” is arguably the best red wine in the world and the grape variety from which it is made, “Nebbiola”, grows successfully in few places. Italy is one, Kephalonia is another, so we’re hoping Sitia, Crete is another.

Just after we’d bought our land we found a little flat area tucked away in a sheltered corner covered with chest high weeds and a few chest high olive trees. Five days of hard weed-clearing graft, slashing dragging and burning, revealed a lovely little terrace where we discovered SOIL! A rare commodity indeed. As the Minoans at Praissos just 0.5 km away numbered 20,000 some 4000 years BC it’s fairly obvious that they farmed the area where our groves are. There’s something in the atmosphere about this little plot that makes us feel they made this little terrace and grew vegetables or something here some 6000 years ago. We now call it “The Orchard Plot” and have augmented the few small olives with half a dozen different varieties of orange trees, a grapefruit, a lemon, two pomegranates, a peach which as I write has burst into flower, a mandarin, a Japanese Loquat, two avocadoes and a walnut. We’ve already got two pears and almond trees. On order are a couple of cherries and a brace of nectarines, so hopefully, in about 5 years, we won’t have to buy any fruit or nuts ever again. The pears, by the way, are this year going to be made into Raki, or “Calvados” as they call pear brandy in Normandy!

The Nebbiola vines will fill up the orchard plot and who knows, in two or three years time we might have our first Barolo wine. Having ordered the grapes and readied the land only then did we do a bit of research on the internet where we read that Barolo is often undrinkable early on, only becoming the king of wines after 20 years in an oak cask! Ah well, it’s good to have long term goals to live for.

This time of year is decidedly the most beautiful in the groves. The olives, peaches and almonds are in blossom, with the wild pears and soon the cultivated pears to come. Everywhere is amazingly green with a luminescence rarely seen anywhere else. As our land has never seen weed killer the profusion of wildflowers is astonishing and every day sees a new variety of flower emerge. There is a clover-type plant that is everywhere and produces thousands of yellow flowers. Anenomes abound in various forms. There are a profusion of orchids, particularly “bee” orchids, tiny flowers that look just like bumble bees. We are reminded of the old water-meadows in England before the advent of corporate prairie farming and the mass chemicalisation of once rich and verdant land.

Posted in Buying olive trees.., Fertilising, In the beginning..., Olive Harvest, Olive Oil, Pressing, Pruning, Sitia, Still picking olives!!, What is life, What is this life if, Wildflowers, full of care, if full of care..., pruning and lovely wild flowers | No Comments »

The first harvest

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

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 11th, dragged on through January and finally ended, with a groan and a whimper, on February 4th.

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.

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