What happens during olive season

We’re almost at the end of olive season. We’ve got about 45 olive trees. Most are syrian olives and a few are manzanillo (sometimes called spanish).

We start picking right after Succoth. We’ve got some friends, Ron and Marty, who enjoy helping us and come out everyday to pick. This year we have a volunteer, Michael, helping us out as well.

So it’s pick, pick, pick. We pick by hand and we use an olive picking machine. The machine looks likes a rake. We hook it up to a battery and it shakes the olives off the trees.

We put plastic around the trees so when the olives fall it’s easier to see them and pick them up.

We cure and spice the manzanillo olives. This year we’ll have enough olives to last us at least until Pesach. If they come out good, we’ll share them with our friends who helped us.

We bring the other olives to press and make oil. Since it's just us, it takes time to finish picking all the olives. As we pick, we store them in a large refrigerator. We try not to store the olives more than a couple of weeks before we bring them to the press. So we usually end up going to the press 2 or 3 times a season. This year we’ve been there twice and we have about 75 liters of olive oil. We’ll probably go once more.

I usually put aside enough olive oil for us and we bottle and sell the rest. It’s 100% olive oil and it’s delicious.

As we’re working, we trim the trees to keep them healthy. As usual, nothing is wasted at Meshek Muslow. The sheep and goats eat all the trimmed branches. Anything they don’t eat, we chip.