We’ve done our first ever olive harvest, and boy was that an education! Many thanks to Bill Hay from The Olive Press in Greytown for their invaluable advice. The long and the short of it is that over 3 days a bunch of us rattled, sorted and shifted 840kg of olives which got pressed into 100 litres of premium olive oil. Now we know what to expect, we’ll be doing it a bit differently next year but the principles are now understood.
Here’s the video, click to play:
There was a bit of a chaotic moment at the mill when the council temporarily shut it down. The council had given permission for the press to run, but when push came to shove found their sewerage systems were not as capable as they’d thought and told the press to hold off. Bill and his capable crew arranged holding tanks and did an amazing job of keeping our stored produce in good shape, and despite the council’s best efforts gave us an awesome load of the good oil.
There’s a lot more to this olive oil thing than we squeezed in, and we’ll get into more details in coming episodes.