Olive picking in Kissamos

Picking olives near Kissamos

Picking olives near Kissamos

Yet another year of home made olive oil!

Thanks to Jens and Tina, who kindly agreed to let us pick the olives on their land in their absence, we spent a few merry days in the grove with the long long stick.

I think we totalled 7-8 mornings of olive picking, not all consecutive and never more than 2-3 hours at a time, to keep it easy.

The harvest was a bit meagre considered the effort, which felt like a lot of effort. However, it was worth every drop of it.

We did inquire about getting an electric, rotating picker, but we considered:

Rotating picker, quantity “1”: 200 € +

Cheapest-ass generator, qty 1: 300€ =

500€  <——>  50€ estimated value of final produce (which turned out to be optimistic)

Ergo, not worth the investment.

Instead, we used our hands and the long long stick.

In the end we managed to get one very full + one very empty bag of olives, about 50-60kg in total. Unfortunately we didn’t weigh the big sack, so we don’t have the exact weight.

Olive Pickers

Olive pickers having a break

Not that it matters much anyway. We went straight to the press after the end of our last harvest day. The olive presser informed us (after the fact, of course) that he had to mix our bags with someone else’s, because of the small size. Keep in mind that most farmers here produce an order of magnitude or two more, that is tens or even hundreds of bags. Anyway, we contributed maggots, and someone else surely contributed a bit of sprayed poison to this particular mix. Not sure how the presser calculated how much oil our bags produced either.

In any case, we got 12.5 liters of fresh olive oil!

Tasting freshly pressed olive oil really is one of the joys of life. Doubly so when it’s your own courtesy of Jens and Tina, actually triply so because it’s the fruit of sharing! Plus, a bonus because it’s all hand picked.

How good is that?