I was awake at seven this morning. My youngest has quite a bad cough and I got woken up by her coughing. It was cold and dark and I was tempted to just drift back to sleep. But seeing as I had to be up by 8, there was no point. So I got up, went outside and got blasted by the cold. The dogs water bowl was frozen over and before long my hands began to ache a little. So I ventured back into the truck and made a pot of thyme, lemon and honey tea for my youngest to drunk throughout the day, whilst I was working.
First I had to feed the neighbours cats, I've been doing it for a week now and I have another week to go. But they are lovely cats and I'm happy to do it. Then I headed down to road, to meet a friend who was giving me a lift. Her car was frozen over. She got some warm water for the windscreens, but they began to freeze over again almost straightaway. Luckily we didn't have to drive too far. To day we were harvesting 4 of the bigger trees on the land. I managed to climb up into one today. But I spend just as much time, on the ground with a huge length of bamboo, knocking the olives down. I swear I'll have shoulders and a neck of steel, by the end of this.
I'm pretty impressed with how much olives we've harvested, between yesterday and today. You can see the amount in the picture above, I reckon their is a good 700kg there. The aim is to get at least 1000kg to the mill on Wednesday. In the end, we done another 5 trees. With four left to do tomorrow. It was a long day. But a productive one.
The trees get pruned at the same time, so there is always a lot of clean up to do after each tree. This seems to take the longest as most of the branches still have olives on them, as well as needing to be cut into smaller pieces, to be used as firewood or mulch around some of the fruit trees on the land. Honestly I could feel the muscles in my arms grow as I worked lol.
It's a good idea to keep your head covered when harvesting, as it's normal to get get hit in the head by falling olives. I tend to wear a hat, whilst 2 of my friends opted for scarves. The day started of freezing, but by midday, I was stripped down to my vest, basking in the winter sun. At the end of the day we had the most amazing sunset. With the mountains turning red. In Ireland there is a saying, "red sky at night, a farmers delight". Basically meaning it will be sunny tomorrow. But apparently there is some rain on the way, according to the forecast. For once I hope not, so that we can finish the harvest tomorrow.
