Shawn's Blog — Olive Harvest

I have not had time to write as it has been a crazy season of milling that is nowhere near finished. This brief holiday break gave me a chance to write a bit, however. At this point, it looks like we will continue to mill E.V.O.O. throughout all of January and, weather permitting, flavored oils in February. This year's harvest, as anticipated, was the largest we've seen in our area in the 16 years we have been milling commercially. Some of what I wrote in my pre-harvest post was accurate and some was not. Here is a recap. I had...

Harvest is upon us and since we have been in this business, I've never been so happy to have it happen.  I don't think our inventory has ever been this low at this time of year so we desperately need to get oil coming in. The size of the crop is quite large in our area and that is wonderful news. While we have seen the harvest move forward 2 - 3 days at a very steady rate over the last 10 years or so, this year's looks like it is going to be a little bit earlier than what used...

I had visions of writing several posts during milling season documenting the progression of the season, perhaps photos of the same variety of fruit coming in several weeks apart and also giving the differences in yields we saw as this transpired. Then I had hoped to have bucolic photos of our crop coming in on beautiful fall days, harvest crews in the background and so on. The reasons this did not happen are threefold. First and foremost, milling season didn't really happen this year. As has been pretty well documented in my blog and elsewhere, the crop was extremely light...

In May, I wrote about the peculiar bloom and fruit set we were experiencing.  I thought that it could prove to be a very interesting year. First, I should make a few qualifications about my comments below though. Most of the exposure I get to growing operations is in the coastal zones of California and tend to be from about Monterey south. Also, for the most part they are traditionally farmed orchards and not super high density operations. That being said, during the year I do talk to a lot of people throughout the state and it seems that it is...

It's that time of year. Every year at about this time we start to get inquiries about olive milling. It is too early to be worrying about harvest and milling but it is hard getting this message to resonate with people very excited about their first or second crop. Like every year, this year I have already heard, "Well last year we started harvesting on October 25th, so we'd like to schedule based on that timing". And, "We'd rather book a time and make sure we have something scheduled than risk not getting a milling time".  There is no way...