Olive Harvest 2022: The Act of Picking Olives

Here's part two of a photo series on this year's olive harvest in Castelbuono, Sicily. This time I take a look at how olives are harvested

This year’s harvest in Castelbuono, Sicily, is one of the best in recent years and many locals are comparing it to the bountiful raccolta (Italian for harvest) of 2015. Olive trees tend to produce fruit every two years, which means harvests can often be of low yield. Other factors and conditions can make for poor harvests too: Drought, the activity of olive fruit flies, windy springs that cause olive flowers to fall, too much rain. But the olive pickers of Castelbuono were fortunate this year to be rewarded with a good harvest, though not a record-breaking one.

There are lots of ways to pick olives but the most common and effective way is to lay large synthetic nets — usually green in color — around trees in order to catch olives that can be picked by hand, raked off with plastic claws, made to fall by striking sticks and knocked down by mechanical devices. Olive nets are typically made of light-weight flexible and durable material made from polyethylene monofilament. Some people in Castelbuono also collect olives by placing an umbrella upside down in a tree and pulling the olive fruit into the umbrella.

Once a tree has been picked, the nets are then pulled up in such a way as to heap the fruit all together. Harvesters then remove as many leaves, twigs, bits of mud and grass as they can before dumping the olives into plastic olive crates (cassette) or olive bags. The crates are better because they allow the freshly-picked olives to breathe. It’s always best to get harvested olives to the olive mill as soon as possible in order to get the best olive oil possible and obtain the highest levels of polyphenols, those natural chemical molecules that are so prized for their health effects due to their antioxidant and other properties.

Here, then, are a few photographs about picking olives.

Our green olive net gets picked up from around a small tree with a few olives on it

The days were bright, warm and sunny at the start of the harvest in early November. Osage and Tupelo remove twigs and leaves from a haul of olives.

A puppy from a nearby farm showed up for a few days at the start of the harvest and accompanied us as we picked our first trees. It was a funny experience and one we are all too familiar with in the countryside as stray dogs show up from time to time, leaving us with the delicate task of figuring out what to do with the lovely creatures that we cannot keep but must feed and find a home for. In the early days, we were also accompanied by an overly curious magpie that flew into the trees next to us and dove at our heads. Unforunately, I didn’t take a phjotograph of the bird

Olive picking involves lots of ladders

Our dear friend Marion (left) showed up to help pick for a couple of days. Olive harvesting is so much fun with friends and family, quiet chats among the branches; taking a break for water and coffee and tea; spending time together.

A nice big tree pruning ladder is set up in front of a big olive tree in need of pruning as well as picking. This tree is on the land we have acquired next to our original land. The new land has lots of olive trees and turned us into true olive oil makers.

With so many olives to pick, we quickly agreed that it could not all be done by hand. We needed to buy an olive-picking machine — a macchinetta. So, off to town I went to look for one while also asking friends, family and others about what kind of machines were available. We considered buying one online and borrowing one from a friend. Here’s one machine I saw in a shop.

In the end, I chose to buy this macchine, an Italian-made picker by the Olix company that runs off a car battery or a lithium battery that you can carry on your back. The flappers knock olives down. It was time to get mecchanical in our harvest.