How to pick olives

The collection of olives is an activity that begins in the fall, although its specific collection depends on what we want to use them for. If our goal is to make some delicious seasoned olives, we will pick them up in November, while if we want to use them for oil production we will have to wait until the beginning of the year. If you have an olive tree at home and you are dying to make your first harvest, we tell you the different alternatives to know how to pick olives .

one

As we have said, the maturation of olives is key in their collection, so it is important to collect them as they are ripe. If you leave them too long in the olive tree, or wait for them to fall from the tree, the fruits could get stung and lose quality.

two

Milking is the most traditional method for harvesting olives. If you have few olive trees and your goal is table olives, milking, or picking by hand, will be the most effective system. The method is as simple as picking the olives manually, using a ladder to reach the highest branches of the tree. The advantage of this system is that the olives are not damaged, although it can be a rather slow process.

3

Another well-known and simple method is vareo. As the name suggests, it consists of hitting the branches of the olive tree with a stick of about two or three meters. The olives will fall on a mesh that previously we will place around the tree. This method is faster than the previous one, although it has the disadvantage that the blows of the stick can damage the branches of the olive tree.

4

Shaking, or picking up by vibration, is a method very similar to vareo. In this case it will not be necessary to hit the olive tree, but we will shake its branches until the olives fall on the ground mesh. This is a rapid collection system, although it is not completely effective and normally it has to be complemented with one of the two methods mentioned above to collect all the olives.

5

Whatever method you use for collecting olives, once you have them all you must clean them to remove the remains of branches, stones or earth that may have.