Brandy, you’re a fine girl….

I’m not sure what this song has to do with olive picking, maybe it was the talk of brine that got me thinking of this song (the next line goes, but my love, my life and my lady is the sea…). Because olive picking time means salt, salt means brine and brine means I need a LOT of jars.

It’s been a gap between posts as we’ve both been at the business end of school and uni teaching semesters. Rohan is now on holidays and I’m about to enter my last week of teaching for the semester and even though I have a massive pile of marking to do, I’m trying to draw breath – 2 days of mental health first aid training reminded me again of how important it is to take time to stop and smell the roses, or in our case – pick the olives.

We began our olive picking experiment on the long weekend when Rohan had his family up for his birthday.

Happy birthday Rohan!

 Prior to sitting down to lunch everyone wandered out into the grove for some experimenting with the best olive picking strategies. Dave had given Rohan some olive picking gear for his birthday including some mini rake heads and handles and a big sheet of shadecloth for laying out around the tree. 

This was the raking experiment, where people clustered around and banged the olives off the branches onto the shadecloth for collection.

 I’d gone more old school and had bought a couple of butchers aprons with pockets on the front for some hand picking.  A couple of hours out there and we had well over 30 kilos of olives, from about 3 – 4 trees. With about 357 trees to go we were underway!

 1st Note to self: Must buy olive press.

The next step was pickling recipes. We began with a tub, some water and some salt – following a recipe from Sally Wise’s “A year on the farm” which recommends throwing all that in together, sealing the lid and walking away for at least 6 months. The leave and forget approach to pickling. Love it. So one beer keg and 12 kilos of olives later and we have an olivey tub of goodness sitting in the spa.

2^nd note to self: Must move olive tub to more sensible location.

The next pickling experiment was in a tub of salt. No water, just salt and leave the olives for about 4 weeks until they have created some sort of weird briney situation all of their own. Then you can jar them.

3^rd note to self: Must eat more jarred goods so have more jars for pickling.

 Today’s olive experiment was to find these beautiful black babies (here you can see that I don’t know my varieties at all, otherwise I’d name them). I picked them with my trusty apron and then began to follow a recipe from an Italian preserving book that Rohan got from Dave for his birthday. Step one was to drop them in boiling water, remove them and leave them overnight to dry. Tomorrow I’ll have to put them in a container with some salt and in 7 days I can jar them in olive oil with chili and commence eating. Express olives from tree to stomach!

4^th note to self: See note 1. Must buy olive press so have large quantities of oil for preserving olives in. I sense a catch 22 here. No press = need to preserve. Preserve = need for olive oil. Olive oil = need for press. 

Um Houston, we have a problem.