Bonjour Ma Chere Amie!
The olives are ripening all over Provence! All those lovely
silvery-green trees are now beginning to drip with plump little orbs. Can you
taste them? Soon everyone will be planning their harvests and I am looking
forward to showing you how it all works. The Greeks have long said that if you want to “cure” your olives for eating you must
harvest in September and then tend them in a salt-water brine for a number of weeks. The practices vary considerably across families, each using recipes passed along through the generations.
They also say that if you want little black nicoise olives, then you
leave them on the trees as late as possible and hope the snow does not kill them.
But mostly, around here in Provence, they say that the best time to harvest for oil is mid-November to mid-December. That is when we take our olives off the trees and on to the Oliversion mill in nearby Cucuron for pressing into our very own oil!
We hand-pick our olives, as do most families: one tree at a time, standing on old ladders, dropping them onto nets or into baskets that hang from the shoulders. It sounds romantic, doesn’t it? Well, maybe not by the end of the third week…
We have a fairly good sized orchard, about 300 trees. It is a bit deceiving because they stand in groups of mostly 2-4 around old tree stumps!
As the legend goes…..In
1956, a serious freeze “killed” nearly all the olive trees in Provence. But
most of the roots survived and before long new trees began sprouting around the
stumps. Chez nous (at our home) most of the stumps now support 2-4 trees, but a few are struggling to support as many as 12-20 trees—can you imagine? Over time, we are moving those trees into new orchards where each has room to grow
Our oil is rich and spicy in the early months after pressing. But 6 months in the cellar under the stairs produces a smooth and delicious oil that goes with all things Provencale and delicious!
You will see for yourself when you come to visit in early December!
A bientot, Janis
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