The olive harvest has started but this year it is complete chaos because of lack of capacity at the mills. We heard from our friends that they delivered their crop with a reservation just before midnight and returned home with their oil at 3 in the morning. Another friend has an appointment to deliver at 2.20 am. When we tried to get a booking at that mill the first available appointment was 10 December.
Our nearest mill, not in our village as both those mills are closed, isn’t taking bookings. It was the same last year, we queued 3 hours to deliver the olives and didn’t get our oil for another 3 days. When I contacted them this year they again said no bookings, I expected they will only allow as many people as they can process to queue and turn the rest away. We spoke to someone recently who said it’s the same everywhere and it’s so sad. Producing your own pure oil locally is totally sustainable. One of the mills in our village was a co operative run for the members, and the oil was processed in the traditional cold press way. They closed several years ago. The other was a modern centrifugal system, we were processed in a few hours. Its short sighted to close these places, particularly the co operative. They say people just want to buy their oil at the supermarket, the waiting lists and queues contradict that and everyone knows the stuff on the shelves is rubbish no matter what it says on the label.
It’s a desperate situation, our area is covered in olive groves, every family has land with trees yet it’s impossible to process the harvest. We didn’t know what to do, though MrFF insisted we keep picking, after three days of hard work we could do no more.
This morning MrFF was up before 6 to go to queue at the mill, not knowing what time they would open as the refused to respond to our enquiries. He arrived before 6.30, the gates locked and no queue, however a notice said they would open at 8.30, by which time one other person had joined him to wait. He delivered 159 kilos of olives, beautifully cleaned by me, the oil should be ready tonight or tomorrow.
Shame as such things are happening all over Europe. My brother has been trying to get his lambs butchered. Few years ago butcher came to their place, then they had to take lambs to the nearest buthcer and now there is no way they can get a spot. Finally he found one over 200km away, that's a lot of stress to those animals.
ReplyDeleteOf course we don't have olive groves here, but I think these problems are related.
How lovely to have your own olive oil from your own olives. How well does it keep?
ReplyDeleteWell done.
ReplyDeleteAfter all your efforts growing, gathering and cleaning, I can only imagine how frustrating it must have felt struggling to find somewhere to press them but great that in the end it worked itself out, even if Mr FF had to have an early start
ReplyDeleteWow, 159 kg of olives - that's a lot of work!!! But I'm glad you got it all processed!
ReplyDeleteThank goodness you managed to get your oil so easily. Harvesting the olives is hard enough. Mr JK and I often watched the locals harvesting the olives if we were in Greece later in the year. xx
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