the olive harvest
& 3 recipes for preserving the most delicious olives
Hello dear readers
I hope this stack finds you all well, settling into the rhythm of January which feels like the longest month on earth, taking time to slow down & rest, as our ancestors have done for millennia before us. This cold & dark time of year is for going inwards & getting our bodies & minds reset & ready for the coming year ahead. Today marks the lunar new year, so we welcome the year of the snake & a 9 year, which is exciting for us as it is a favourite & lucky number.
Food preservation is also something we do to prepare us for the Winter months when there is less available because of the shorter days & cooler temperatures. Olives are one of my favourite foods to have on the shelf year round, they make a great starter, snack & addition to lots of my favourite recipes.
In November I decided I needed to harvest some olives of ours for preserving, we did not manage to harvest olives for oil this year because last year we pruned them really hard so the trees did not put out a huge load of olives, we are hopeful that 2025 will be an improvement on this.
Our olive trees were all here long before we arrived onto the land, I call them our trees but they are not really, we do take care of them to ensure healthy harvests of olives, either for us or for the wildlife sharing the land with us at Eagle Rock when we don’t collect them. I would imagine they are around 50-100 years old, but I can’t be sure, it is just a guess judging by the size of them. We have a few different varieties of olives here, some large & green, others large & blackish purple & lots of the small & black olives which I believe to be the Galega, but I am unsure on the other varieties, I will find that out some day & do a survey of what we have available.
I also plan to plant a lot more olive trees on the farm in the next year or so because it is a safe investment for the future, considering the price of olive oil is rapidly increasing & the “oil” you buy in supermarkets is terrible quality, often not even 100% olive oil.
A good few hours of work went into collecting the olives by hand, luckily for me mostr of the trees are a reasonable height & I did not need to clear around them too much to get access to the branches.
After 4 weeks of washing the olives in fresh water, it was time to salt & flavour them, I cut the olives with a sharp knife to speed up the preserving process.
I chose to make 3 batches of olives this year, sometimes I make kilos upon kilos & they don’t always get eaten so I decided to go small this year because I still have some left from 2021 even. The good thing is - they don’t tend to go bad when they are preserved correctly.
I collected lemons from our tree, herbs from our garden including thyme, oregano, rosemary, ruda & chillies. I have dried bay leaves prepared which were harvested earlier last year year & I used store bought garlic & salt as I did not grow any garlic in 2024.
The first batch was ruda & lemon peel with chilli & garlic.
The second batch is thyme, garlic, bay, chilli & lemon peel.
The third batch which is possibly my favourite flavour - dried rosemary, garlic, chilli & lemon peel.
Orange peel also works really nicely in flavouring olives, I did this when we first moved here & had not yet planted any lemon trees.
The brine is a 10% ratio of salt to water, you add your preferred spices, herbs & olives & then you cover it with the brine & ideally add a cabbage or grape leaf on the top to keep them submerged under the water to prevent them catching the oxygen. I don’t can my jars in boiling water after wards but they are best eaten quicker this way or kept in a fridge once opened for longer life.
The olives are now ready for eating since we are coming to the end of January & I can confirm they are delicious.
Thanks for reading, I appreciate you all.
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Much love, Jaymie x