We’ve had some wild and windy nights here
on the farm. As the trees blow all through the night, I lie inside wondering if
any branches, leaves or olives will be left by morning. After the first of
these wild nights, I went out the following afternoon to see the base of the
olive trees littered with green olives of various sizes. My beautiful olive
crop lay on the ground, glistening with rain that had fallen during the day. I
grabbed a green shopping bag and began picking them up, discarding those that
seemed too bruised, or which looked like they might have already been pecked at
by the birds. Indy wandered along beside me, off lead, munching on olives and
spitting out the pips- who knew dogs were a fan of olives straight from the
tree? (I had done some frantic checking online to make sure I wasn’t poisoning
her).
An hour or so later I had over 3 kilos of
olives and no idea what to do next. I figured I could use these olives as an
experimental batch to try out different preserving recipes. About a
week earlier, I’d had a conversation with one of my colleagues who
told me some of her fondest memories of the first village she lived in were of
olive harvest days. On these days, families from the village would send a boy
as a representative of the family to pick olives with the community. As she grew up in a family of girls, her mother would send her and her sisters as the
family representatives. She talked about picking the olives, filling bucket
upon bucket and then feasting at lunch from tables set up in the grove with the
other adults and children. She went on to say she left this village at the age
of 7 in a time that wasn’t officially classed as war, but there was a push for
territory, and a moving on of the residents of the entire village in less than
a week. Anyone left after that time was massacred and killed. As she spoke, I
was reminded of how incredibly privileged and safe my own life has been. We
talked about my own plans to have people over for harvest, to share food, to
talk and laugh, I said she should come to recapture some of those earlier
memories and she promised to find out from her mother the recipes she uses for
preserving her olives.
In the meantime I headed to my usual source
of information, the internet, to see what I could discover. As I read, a
sinking feeling grew in the pit of my stomach. ‘Don’t pick up and use ‘dropped’
olives – they will be bad’. Uh-oh. I had just collected 3 kilos of olives and
now I discover they will be bad? Still I decided to persevere. What does the
internet know? I reasoned. Anyway, technically these weren’t ‘dropped’ olives,
these were olives that had been kindly harvested by the wind on a stormy night.
What’s the worst that can happen? It’s all a science experiment.
So with a sink full of olives I began by
washing them, scoring slits in them to allow the bitterness to leech out and
then putting them into a barrel filled with a mixture of salt and water. The
plan was that we would change the water each night for at least two weeks
before putting the olives into jars with whatever recipe we decided upon. 3
nights later and we hadn’t changed the first batch of water. This wasn’t going
well. Meanwhile, I was stricken by fear about what to do with the salty water
if I was to dispose of it. What do people do with barrels of salty water? I
can’t pour that down the drains on a farm, sending back it into the earth. I
thought about collecting all the excess water and taking it back to the sea,
pouring one lot of salty brine back into another. Why had I never thought about
the environmental impact of olive preserving processes? Meanwhile 5 days had
passed and I still hadn’t changed the water. As an olive preserver I was
failing, and failing rapidly.
Salvation arrived, as it often does, in the
form of a book. While shopping for presents, I came across a book by Sally Wise
called ‘A year on the farm’.
Wise moved from a home on Tasmania’s coast to one
in the Derwent valley, sharing recipes and tales of her first year on the new
property. She writes of finding traditional methods for preserving olives
complex and time-consuming and then includes a method that seems much more my
style. 5 kilos of olives, 500g of salt, 5 litres of water. Throw it all in
together, seal the lid and leave for 3-6 months. Sure it might be a bit longer
before you can eat them, but I like this idea of throw in, leave, forget and
come back a few months later to see what happened.
They are stunningly beautiful and I’m getting ready to pick some and throw them in a container for preserving experiment number 2. Luckily I’ve got about 360 trees to experiment with, so my failures become just another part of my olive tapestry of tales on the
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