When I was a kid Scrooge McDuck's money bin always intrigued me. He would regularly swim through his money, a massive pile of coin and notes, porpoising through it, breaching like a whale.

I never had a money bin, but I had a big tin of coins. But no matter how I tried to get the feel of what Scrooge was doing, by digging into it as if it was a pile of soil, the hard coins always hurt my hands.

I thought of it last week during the olive harvest.

As the tree-shaker moves from tree to tree, it folds and unfolds its upside down umbrella'd catching net, and wraps itself around the tree. One of my jobs, as the guy on the ground, is to monitor the net, Sometimes things like small branches snap off and can get caught in the machinery. Often some sort of snag holds up the olives, and instead of rolling down into the cavity at the bottom of the machinery, they stick at the top of the catching net. Then, when the net folds/unfolds, the olives are flung out on the ground. So my job is to run around the net as the shaking is finished and kick/punch the net from below, catapulting the olives up and into the hold. Its not difficult, but you need to keep your eye on things and not get in the way of the moving nets. And its tiring, constant movement...its a long day.

Some of our trees are big. The catching net has a radius of about 2.5 metres. We have plenty with a bigger radius than that, some more than a 4 metre radius. So, when its time to shake the tree, a surprising amount of olives drop to the ground, outside the perimeter of the net. Wasted!


Not eveything goes into the net!

A well-pruned tree tends to have less olives simply by virtue of the fact there is less growing area available to the tree. BUT...the pruned tree tends to have bigger olives, more per branch, and they 100% drop into the net, no waste.

The best outcome would be for the grove to be properly pruned in a timely manner to keep the trees all in a good shape for an easy harvest. That's on me. Its me who prunes the trees, but its just me. I don't keep up, the trees grow all the time. I prune every year, but I don't get them all.

So, when the tree-shaker hits a big tree, I step in close and stand just under the canopy of the catching net. A heavy cascade of olives drums down into the net., and sometimes just as much outside the net. Its an exercise that is repeated over and over again, hundreds of times during the harvest days, but I still think its interesting to see up close.

I looked at the big tree we were tackling next...massive. Maybe 100kg of olives on it. This time, instead of hiding under the net, I stood out next to the net. I was going to be rained on by olives! As the green waterfall commences, I thought, I can actually be in the stream. Not quite a river of gold, but something like that.

A Scrooge McDuck moment. It was less like being in a stream of gold than being trapped in a hailstorm. A hundred olives simultaneously hit my face, ears, nose and lips, as if thrown at me. Ouch!

Don't do that.