Saturday 15th October

Another day of olive picking. We were up quite early and  Angelo and  Stefano and our new helper Andrea were getting the compressor ready for another session with the ‘wands’ which shake the olives free from the trees. We soon joined them and set about setting them nets under the trees and then picking by hand, some of the low hanging fruit. This is quite satisfying work although slower than using the wands, it does mean less of the leaves and branches get mixed in with the lives. Using the wands one has to be quite energetic to get the olives to fall. In suppose in the bold days all olives picking was done buy hand with the younger people climbing upm into the trees to get the higher fruit. More recently various kinds of shakers have been introduced and the laying of the nets on the ground more prevalent. However, as many of they trees are on steep slopes, the nets have to be held up to stop all the olives falling down the slope. How this is managed is a sight to see. It can not be easy work. During the year there are other duties to tending the trees, many of the trees are tens if not hundreds of years old.

Angelo and Gianna relax

There must be hundreds of small farms with either tens or hundreds of trees as driving through the countryside, olive trees are everywhere. If not olives, then grapes. Then picked fruit basin taken noon a processor who presses the olives to extract the oil. How much oil there will be this year remains to be seen. Will the very hot summer reduced the oil content of the olives? Already, tropical fruit is being grown in Sicily and this is a symptom of the global warming affecting everywhere in the world.

An aerial view

I flew the drone briefly and got some pictures over the house.

We had dinner with Angelo and Gianna which was then usual lively affair as the family’s got back together and caught up on news. There was much merriment as it’s seemed that everybody time Angelo spoke about a person, he or she seemed to be related to Bruno!! Six degrees of separation??