This Saturday was our second day of olive picking for 2010. We are lucky to have volunteers that help every year to bring in the harvest. This year’s team were Jane, Simon, Meg, Arabella, Sophie, vineyard manager Nick, Jono (for the third time in a row!), my aunt Sarah, uncle Stuart, and cousin Rose. Later in the day we also had help from Stephen and four year old Reuben (who was particularly good at getting to the hard to reach fruit).

The day dawned wet and gloomy so we delayed our start to 9:30. We pick the bulk of the olives by hand but this year we borrowed a machine to help us reach the very highest fruit. The machine is basically a large vibrating fork that shakes the fruit off the branches. We lay out nets to catch the fruit and then empty it into small plastic bins and then tip those into a larger bin.

Although the trees were wet picking was pleasant and social as usual. Olive trees are a good height for hand picking. As someone pointed out the downside to olive picking is that it is one of the few fruit crops that you can’t snack on while picking. Olives off the tree taste terrible! Its amazing how delicious they are once pressed into oil or marinated into table olives.

Arabella was on kitchen duty and prepared a delicious lunch of scones and soup. After a half hour break we were back at it and we finished up by 3 pm which we were very pleased with. Our bin was full to the brim with 406 kgs of olives and while Simon drove it off to be pressed the rest of us enjoyed a cold beer. As I write today Simon is off to pick up the freshly pressed oil.

Today is fairly wet in Marlborough and we are pleased that we got the olives in yesterday! It is really satisfying knowing that the fruit is picked and pressed and we can look forward to having another year’s supply of delicious home produced olive oil. You can see more photos on our Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/durvillea/

- Meg