This past Thursday was our 2021 olive harvesting day! It was an all hands on deck effort to get our olives off the trees and turned into olive oil. Even some of us in the office chipped in a bit. A small crew stayed in the wash and pack area to take care of CSA boxes and orders, but everyone else grabbed tarps, ladders, hand rakes, and poles and headed out to the olives in three teams. Each team laid down tarps and then proceeded to pull, rake, and whack all the olives off the trees. Many larger olive oil operations use mechanical shakers to get the olives off of the trees, but we do it by hand. The olives on the tarps are emptied into small harvest bins which were dumped into large macro bins which were ferried back to the shop when full to be kept cool until we finished. It was a long day of work, but it was a true team effort and we had great weather.
