One of the activities that has been on our bucket list for a long time now is picking olives in Calabria, Italy.
Despite a few visits to Italy, we have never got the timing right as olive picking only starts late October and goes through until February, depending on the harvesting method that is being used.
But this year we got our timing right and late October found us in Calabria, Italy.
We were staying with our Italian friends who own a small olive farm near Lubrichi. The weather was perfect for picking and so it was all systems go.
How to Pick an Olive
There are three ways that olives are picked in Calabria:
- If the land is flat and the farm is big enough to warrant the expense, then a tractor with a tree shaking extension arm can be used. This shakes the tree quite violently and the olives fall onto the net spread below the tree for collection.
- When the topography of the land the trees are planted on is too steep or undulating for a tractor, then hand held shakers can be used. These are mostly pneumatically driven and so you have to be able to get a compressor fairly close to the action.
- Wind power! This is the old fashioned way. The farmers lay the nets on the ground and hope that the wind will be strong enough to blow the olives off the tree onto the nets below. This is obviously very weather dependent and the least productive way of harvesting olives.
And finally there is good old hand picking which is reserved for the odd low hanging wayward branch of olives that it would be a pity to leave unharvested!
On “our” farm, the trees were mainly planted on fairly steep slopes, so the hand held shakers were the most common tools used for shaking the olives off the trees.
The Art of Picking Olives While Not Speaking Italian
This visit had been planned for a while, so when we arrived in Calabria I had notched up just short of 250 days of “learning” Italian with Duolingo. That equated to me confidently being able to say “Mi dispiace, non parlo italiano” which translates to “sorry I don’t speak Italian”.
Not that it really mattered because my fellow olive pickers were Calabrians – and they don’t really speak Italian either! They speak Calabrese – a southern dialect that has links to Sicily and which most Italians from up north can’t understand!
Luckily, their English was not quite up to the standard of my Italian 🙂 – so no one felt left out of this apparent communication problem.
However, despite this small impediment, we got on famously and got the job done!
A Typical Olive Picking Day.
A typical day of olive picking went like this:
- Wake up at 6h15. Coffee and breakfast and then collected at 7h00 for the short drive to the farm.
- Open the shed, load up nets, crates and shakers into the trusty (very) old Fiat Panda 4×4, and fuel the little mini transporter and compressor.
- Head out on foot to the picking spot.
- Scramble up/down steep slopes with nets and spread them out under the trees to catch the maximum number of olives when the tree shakers get to work.
- Hold up the edges of the nets, often above head height, to ensure you catch olives that get thrown out and away from the tree by the shakers.
- Collect olives out of nets and put in crates for later collection and taking to the local processing plant.
- Move from tree to tree repeating the process
- 12h00 – down tools and back home for lunch which was always a delicious pasta washed down with a glass or two of local wine (made in-house from grapes grown on the farm – alcohol content unknown!). PS – while I was picking olives, Dianne was in the kitchen learning how to cook up a storm Italian style!
- Back to work at 13h00 and keep going until 16h00 when all the full crates are carried to an accessible point to be picked up by the Panda.
- Nets, shakers and compressor returned to the shed.
- Home, shower, a welcome beer, pasta and wine for dinner (naturally), then into bed by 22h00
- Repeat next day ……….for 9 days…..but thankfully with a few days off (read – recovery days) when my fellow pickers had other commitments.
Turning Olives Into Olive Oil
At the end of every day the crates full of olives were taken to the local olive oil processing plant. The whole process is automated and runs like clockwork.
The next afternoon, when the next batch of crates are dropped off, your oil is waiting for you, together with a lab analysis of the oil.
There are several ways the oil can be distributed.
- Supplied back to the olive farm owner in bulk who then sells/gives it away to their own customers. This is how our friends distribute their oil. They supply the mill with 50l stainless steel cans that the mill then fills with their olive oil.
- Dispensed into two, three or five liter cans for commercial distribution.
- Bottled with fancy labelling for distribution to high end markets.
- And probably another dozen ways which we didn’t get to see.
The residue of the process is turned into either compressed pellets that are used instead of wood for fires, or as a bulk agricultural fertilizer.
Nothing goes to waste.
When The Going Gets Tough
We harvested olives from just over 400 trees. Some of these trees are around 500 years old, while some were planted less than 10 years ago.
Southern Calabria was devastated by a series of earthquakes in 1783 which turned the plains into an area of steep slopes. But life went on and the surviving locals regrouped and planted more olive trees, this time on the steep slopes.
Although hard to capture in a photograph, the pic below gives you some idea of how steep the terrain can be. The tree on the right is on level ground while the ground falls away steeply to it’s left. But the slope has olive trees on it, planted at various times after 1783.
It’s hard to imagine how they harvested these trees before the advent of modern technology, Even with modern technology – and the best intentions – some trees, or parts of trees, are just not safely accessible for harvesting.
But they give it a good go – including climbing up trees with the shakers in an effort to get to the olives at the top of the tree!
There is no doubt that picking olives in Calabria is a full body workout that requires a fair degree of strength and stamina. But three out of the four members of the A team were well equipped to face the rigours of the challenge while I was just grateful I could get out of bed every morning.
After Action Satisfaction
Refueling is essential after a prolonged period of grueling physical activity – I found Gelato to be the ideal option 🙂
