Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Picking and Curing Olives


We were walking down our street and we noticed a neighbor's olive trees. The trees still had some fruit on them, but the ground was littered with loads of black and green olives. We talked about what it would be like to cure olives. The next thing I knew, Marcia was sending out a message to our neighborhood email list asking whether anyone with an olive tree would mind if we picked the fruit. Several neighbors responded and here is the result of her effort.
We are generally following the curing process described at the Milkwood site -- an Australian olive grower. There is also some great olive information available at this Caltech website . Caltech has an olive harvest coming up on November 7.

I don't know how the olives are going to turn out, but they sure look nice. Oh, if you taste a raw and uncured olive be prepared for a shock. They are incredibly bitter.

5 comments:

The Skin Care Shop said...

Those look beautiful... I will check back to see how they turn out... I hope you will post about them... how long does it take?

Ramshackle Solid said...

Hi, Love your blog.

We have lots of olives at our place and wanted to harvest them this year but unfortunately we have olive fly infestation in this area and most of the fruit is infested with worms.

We sprayed an organic pesticide this year but we started to late and were not regular enough.

Caltech has began harvesting their olives last year. This year they have a harvest festival planned on 11/7. They are using an organic trap (made from plastic bottles filled with water and a certain yeast) as well as an organic spray to keep the flies under control.

Here's a link: http://olives.caltech.edu/faq

I will likely post more about it in the next few days on our blog.

Can't wait to see how your olives turn out. Next year we plan to press our olives into oil.

Eric Thomason said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ramshackle Solid said...

Oops. I don't know how I missed your link and reference to the caltech olive festival in the blog post. Cheers.

Luray va accommodations said...

Its looks very nice and I love to eat olives. IMO, it was about 8 weeks for the brine, 6 weeks for the dry ones. You can start testing when the dry ones start to shrink in the salt and the brine olives will start to get soft.