We've notionally finished our olive harvest, and its been very successful. It wasn't without its issues, but overall I am happy with the results.

I've tasted the fresh oil. Its very good. Different to our normal flavour. We picked later than normal this year so its not as spicy as expected, but its very lush and buttery. The oil is so fresh it smells like fruit juice.

I'm entering in the usual awards and I'm eager to to see how it goes.

When I say notionally finished, we've only picked 1/2 of the trees. In March I booked the harvest contractors for 2 days in early June, and I actually discussed with them what would happen if they finished early on the second day. It turned out to be the opposite of that...we ran out of time, there was so much to pick. We have three paddocks containing more than 750 trees. The biggest paddock has about half of the trees. We didn't even finish that one paddock, much less the other two.

Last year pre-harvest we walked around and marked the the trees that needed picking. There were lots that didn't warrant use of the harvesters' time. This year, we only skipped three trees. Every tree had a bumper crop.

We sent off just over 10 tons of olives, and it returned an astonishing 2100 litres of oil. That's about 21%, which is the best result we've had here since we moved in. (I had budgeted for 8 tons and 1000 litres...12.5%) If I could get the rest picked there's probably another 5 tons there. Just amazing. That extra rain we had in January and February, plus the poor prior year, spurred the the trees on to outdo themselves. I've discussed the possibility of getting the harvester's back, but he's so far behind schedule now its unlikely he'll have a spare day for 6 weeks, and my orchard will be finished before that.

The stress before, during and after is quite intense. The contractor blew up his tree-shaker a week before our place and spent a week getting it fixed. That meant he had to reshuffle everyone by that week. In that extra time we had three frosts, the arctic blast/high winds weather that devastated Gippsland ( but missed us) and twice had a forecast for hail which arrived, but not at our place. It also meant our harvest was over the long weekend, which turned into a problem when things went wrong.

The frost is very stressful. Down the road, a week before us, another orchard had four tons of picked fruit knocked back at the processing plant because the frost had killed it and it had started to rot. They didn't want to contaminate their gear and refused to process it. When I heard that story I got really worried. But, we are lucky being close to the river which moderates the frost severity. We had a tiny percentage of burnt low-hanging fruit, but almost nothing overall. Plus we have different olives to the other place. Our frantoio are much more frost-tolerant.

On the second day of the harvest we got a call from the crushing plant...again, equipment failure, can't process the olives. (And can't fix the machinery when everyone's on holiday...!)That meant trucking them off to Kyneton to another processor then trucking the oil back. I got stopped by the police for having a defect on my trailer. I ended up hiring a trailer to avoid the issue.

Today a chap with a forklift arrived to move the heavy barrels onto racks. The racks are high enough that I can tap the oil just using gravity. There's a leaky barrel to deal with, and some other complications, but our oil is here!

Now I can get some sleep!

Postscript: Harvest pick finished Sunday 13th June. Today, Wednesday 16th June, we had a 20 minute hailstorm.