Olive harvest 24 - 26 April 2026

Still behind in this....

Met Justin in the city, and we left around 5pm - of course some traffic along the way, so got there after 7pm.  Just leftovers for dinner I assume

Alex is visiting from Vietnam, and came up with April and Jarad before us - they unpacked, had a look around the garden (Nice photo by Alex)

And then left for Guildford to see Curtis.  The general store is now closed, but he does pizza at the Stables  - from Thursday - Sunday nights

Alex took a nice shot of our front door on leaving

And a photo of April and Jarad at the Stables

They got back to Inglewood around 10.30pm or so 

Saturday, and after the obligatory puzzles and the Saturday Age got outside and I started picking the  olives at 9am.

 It was cool to begin, but the sun came out and certainly warmed up

The olives were still green and relatively hard.  I was about to call up John at Maccas and ask him about them - when Terry came to help - and I asked him.  he said they were good, and so we picked

Justin came out around 10 and initially did some work on the canoe - another layer of varnish

He came and picked olives after that, Alex came out around 11.00, and April and Jarad around 12

I asked Justin to put on some olive picking music from Spotify, and that was a bit of fun - initally some sort of German play list with a German teensy weeny yellow polka bikini song, and then another song in German - we swapped across to a more mediterrannean playlist 

Broke for lunch around 1 or so - Justin went and got some supplies from the IGA, and we ate in the rotunda (I assume)

Then back to it - til after 6 for me, April and Jarad

Certainly didn't cook - either got takeaway or went to the pub for dinner

Sunday and more olive picking of course - I wanted to reach a new record of 200kg

I went and picked out the front - Susan and my favourite tree - little olives - but apparently lots of oil.

Well, we filled 10 baskets and  some boxes also -as per below - and we didn't even strip all the trees - there were still many kilos left - but we'd had enough

Alex and the others had left after lunch - and I took the below photo around 3pm before we loaded them into the car

Terry and I used the luggage scales to weigh the baskets - and tipped the box contents into a basket to weight them - and then back in the box  

 

I had guessed 230kg, Terry 210kg  - and Terry won  - as it was an astounding 204kg

I picked some more olives for table olives and also some pomegranates

Was pleased to see some of the lupin seeds had come up

 

And the cosmos are out

Not so pleased to see a wasp nest by the front door

Or a lot of dampness around some of the garden beds - we hadn't watered, and it hadn't rained, but it was still pretty damp

Given that we had so many olives - Justin wasn't sure if it would all fit in our car - along with our other stuff - but they did 

Got to Maccas around 3.45, and when John saw the olives he was a little dubious - didn't think there weas that much oil in them.  Said he would have waited another three weeks.  This was very disappointing news - we hoped that he would be able to get a lot of oil out of them ....As it was, when we went to pick up a few weeks later - there wasn't that much oil - not even a full water cube...- very disappointing for all of those kilos.  John told me that we had to wait til the olives were a little bit soft - which is the oil.  On previous occasions he had said that water had got into the olives - and so couldn't get as much of the oil out as possible then either - you can't win!

I had picked this weekend - as the next time we could come up would be 23rd May, and then not til June after that - and I didn't want to wait that long.  Maybe I should have