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We always feel a little under pressure during the harvest. There is often an underlying worry that the Cooperative will stop taking in olives and we won't be finished. In reality they continue until the last man has brought in the last olive. But we don't want to be the last man.

This year most of our neighbours were using mechanical shakers and petrol driven leaf blowers to gather up the harvest. In previous years the countryside resounded with the sounds of wood on wood as sticks hit branches laden with olives. Sometimes we could even hear the satisfying thuds as the olives hit the ground. And there were always voices calling, shouting, greeting.. and laughter. That was all missing this year. At times we felt we were the only ones using sticks.


Except for one neighbour whose mechanical shaker broke and so he turned up the next day with some friends armed with sticks. We were able to call out greetings across the fence and shout encouragement. They finished well before us and…

Our olive harvest started late this year. Not our fault at all. The Cooperative has not been able to find a single buyer for the entire harvest (at a price they were happy with) so they delayed hugely. The whole thing usually gets underway around the 9th December. This year we began on 24th December. Thankfully we had not secured any volunteers this year or they would have been twiddling their thumbs.


Anyway. Christmas eve came and we were off! I made a series of short (the longest is about 5 mins) films that show the whole process from start to finish . Bear in mind that I don't have any editing equipment, am filming with my phone and don't work to a script. It's one shot, for better or worse ☺️

Part 1.


As you can see the weather was kind. Thank goodness  its a hard enough job when it's nice never mind having to cope with rain or fog.

Part 2.



The whole harvest took us three weeks, although we only worked 13 full days, the rest was taking time off for R & R, or for…