#fundao

Once we were handed the keys to the farm we literally walked straight into our olive harvest. We have 93 trees and they were all heavy with black shiny olives ready for the picking.. the only problem was that we had no idea what we were doing lol.

After some research we found out the best way for 2 people to get through that many olives would be to buy a verejador which you connect to your car battery and is like an electric comb that agitates the olives. We also got a long handled comb and a hand comb so we could both be busy at once. We found a lagar (co-operative) in Fundao too that we could take our olives to for pressing. If you have a good quality of olives they don’t charge you anything (besides for the container) but take a percentage of your olives as they use it to make one of the most saught after olive oil in the region. Unless you have a few tonnes of olives to press, you don’t get your own olives pressed but can be rest assured they only accept the best.

On the day we began, we layed out all the nets and started going for it! I was really enjoying myself and proud we could finally be doing something productive on the land. It was quite tricky as you need to be careful where you stand, else you end up squashing the olives and wasting all your hard work. Jase and i had a good method going and we broke for lunch with almost 3 full barrels filled. After lunch the machine started making a weird noise and then next thing it stopped working eek. With so many olives to pick we had to make a quick decision and Jason drove all the way back to Fundao (40min round trip) to get the machine changed out. It turned out to be the fuse that had blown and when we got going again it lasted 2 minutes and broke again double eeeeeek. Arg how frustrating as we were nowhere near where we needed to be and wouldn’t be possible by hand comb to make it worthwhile and the lagar was only open every second day in the first week so the olives would be too far gone to wait 2 days. We begrudgingly called it a day and gave our neighbour the 100kgs of olives we had collected.

After going back to the shop the next day we found out it was the machine that was faulty after all and they gave us a brand new machine on the spot phew! The rest of the pick went really well with no issues and at the end of it all we picked just under 400kgs of olives :) We arrived at the lagar at 7 in the morning and the queue was already a hundred or so deep. The first trip took 8 hours yikes but the day didn’t seem to drag for me as I had my kindle to keep me busy. We were super excited when they sampled our olives and gave us extra virgin rating! You back your car up on these cattle grates and you drop your olives into this pit where they get weighed. They then go on this conveyor belt up up and away and then you done. Collection of the oil was about 3 weeks later and true to word it is most definitely the best oil i have tasted, partly because of all the blood sweat and tears that went into it all. 

In the end we didnt pick all the trees as the bottom terraces had over ripened by the time we got there. I think next year we will try and take some to Sobral as they open earlier so we can pick the bottom terraces first. The 37 litres we got will most definitely last us the year and when olive season hits next year we will be able to hit the ground running!