Jonathan Sachs

@Nikolaj Vinicoff   I'm tremendously underqualified to help you. You know the bumper sticker that says, "I'm not a cowboy, I just found a hat"? (Maybe not, if you live near Gibraltar.) Anyway, I'm not an olive farmer, I just found a tree.

I'm only collecting fully ripe olives (as I said, when they fall), and I'm only curing them; I haven't considered making oil.

I know nothing about care and feeding of the trees. I hope we can both learn something from the comments of others.

My experience with harvesting wouldn't help you. As I said, shaking the tree has little effect. As for beating it with a one-meter stick... imagine beating an elephant with a pencil. It would have about as much effect.

I think the tree is about 20 meters high. It has grown without much attention since... probably since the house was built, about 60 years. There are massive branches near the ground, and more massive branches above those, and more above those. If I had a ladder big enough to reach the upper branches, I couldn't set it up, because there would be no room. The olives must grow mostly near the crown, where there is direct sunlight, because I never even see many of them on the tree. I only see them after they fall.

I can't even imagine how to prune a tree like that for production, unless I cut it down to ground and took control as it grew back. I'm going to engage an arborist at some point, and I'll ask them about this. They may tell me it isn't possible.

And I'm afraid I don't have a clue what the thing is you're supposed to do to get production. Maybe I'd get lots more olives if I did it. Maybe I'm already doing it without knowing it, although that's unlikely, because I'm not doing much of anything except picking up the olives and preventing the tree from attacking my house.  You can probably find clues to this "thing" if you read some introductions to olive culture on the web (as I should).

I have one comment on your picture. It appears that those two trees are on rather uneven ground, with a steep dropoff on the right. I can testify from my very limited experience that that makes harvesting the fruit and pruning the tree much, much harder. I've never actually seen an olive orchard, but I imagine them situated on flat or gently sloping land.

Hi, this is my first post. I'm not sure whether it makes sense to add to an old thread or start a new one, but better to do it wrong, I think, than not do it at all.

I have an olive tree on my property (in north central California, near Sacramento). I tried curing some olives last year, and was quite successful. This year I'm doing it again on a larger scale (about five liters of olives), and  want to experiment with several ways of finishing them. But I have accumulated several questions from my experience.

First, how do you harvest them? The first year I just picked them up off the ground. This year I got a fruit net, which gave them a little cushioning and made them easier to collect. I tried shaking the tree to get them before they were so ripe that they fell on their own, but it wasn't very effective because the tree is much, much, much bigger than I am. (It covers the entire width of my patio -- on one side -- and keeps growing branches over the house. I've thought about trimming it to make it easier to manage, but I have no idea how to do that properly.)

Second, is there a practical way to figure out what kind of tree I have? The fruit are pretty small, about 2 cm long, and the leaves... look like olive tree leaves. I'm pretty sure that the person who planted the tree intended it to be ornamental, not fruit bearing. (And he never thought about how ornamental it would look when it got big enough to shade the house!)

Third, how long is a harvest supposed to last? I thought my tree was done around Thanksgiving, and shortly after that I had contractors working on my house, which ruled out using the fruit net. A month later I see more olives lying on the ground, some of which look pretty fresh... I'm not trying to harvest them, but I wonder whether I should extend the "harvest" into December next year. I know, if I picked the olives off the tree I wouldn't have this issue, but that's not possible at present.

Fourth, how do you keep the olives under water? I'm using Mason jars, and this year I bought fermentation weights, which worked great for a couple of weeks... then the olives shrank and retreated below the neck of the jar, and now when I drop a weight in, the olives just pop up around the edges.

Fifth, if I'm going to flavor them with herbs in the finish brine, how much is enough? I've read instructions for flavoring olives with rosemary, garlic, and various other things, but none of the sources give quantities. A ten centimeter sprig of rosemary per liter? Or ten of them, chopped up? One chopped clove of garlic or four?