Looking back at past harvests we always enjoy seeing our friends and family picking olives for a couple of days and celebrating with a Harvest Dinner afterwards. This year, we hired a professional crew who brought their own equipment and picked our olives in a couple of days the last week of November ahead of killing frosts. Instead of using our electric combs, they preferred using picking buckets and ladders.

We watched and learned and saw that in the future when we are all back together again, we will probably do a hybrid harvest: a hired crew and friends and family. Our orchard is maturing still and we expect we will need the help of a local crew to pick the olives in order to get them to the mill quickly.

Two things were significant about the 2020 harvest: This was an “off” year for the trees, meaning production was down from last year, but because we harvested before any killing frosts, we were able to harvest from all the varieties of trees. We are very pleased with the quality. However, 2020 oil quantities are limited.