Olive Harvest

We had our first olive harvest. We don't actually know how to tell if they are ripe but they turned black so that seemed sort of telling.
We have a dozen Lucca trees that we pulled out of an 8 year old orchard in Valley Springs almost 2 years ago. Digging the holes in our rocky hard pan soil was the hardest part. Pulling the trees up was really very easy. We thank the Buy and Sell for our $25 per tree orchard. The first winter a couple of them blew down. They suffered quite a bit. Then the drip system failed the next year. The 2 that had fallen down looked as if they were goners for sure. This year they all look great. They are so hardy it's no wonder how some olive trees have been able to live more than 2000 years. The orchard we got them from brought the trees back from an old orchard in Lucca, Italy. They are good olive oil trees and are especially good at blocking the view beyond our property line.
We grabbed a much too large bucket and a small bowl for each of us to collect the olives. It's about as fun as picking grapes one orb at a time. Thank goodness we really didn't have more than 10 pounds. Emmie ran the giant bucket back and forth to us only dumping its contents out once. We were able to recover most of them from the mulch layer. Clay drove the electric Jeep right up under the trees to stand on to reach the higher ones. He'd pick a small kid sized handful and jump back in the Jeep. He'd peel out and drive around the row to find another tree from which to pick. He was very serious about his job and yelled at us to move out of the way as he tore through the trees.
It was a great way to spend a warm fall evening. The kids were rather disappointed with the bitterness of the olives. They looked like the ones from the can so they were thrilled to help us pick. How sad they were when they couldn't put them on their fingers and bite them.
Grandma Dora is going to leach the olives with lye first. Then she will put them in a bucket outside for 10 days with water slowly dripping into it. She's the true Italian in the family and has done this many times before with her mother. We're crossing our fingers the olives will be edible and her labors will not be wasted. We hate to take advantage of her, she is going to be 94 this November 10Th after all.