Raccolta delle olive

2 Ott.
Ciao a tutti.. Raffaele and I harvested all our olives. The harvest took 18 man-hours and we pressed enough for 13 liters and 3 tbsp of oil from 55 kg of olives! Like I said before, we had many trees with only 1 olive!! others had 2 and others with 10.. sad, no? It costs very little to press olives if you don't have very many, but then again I haven't received the bill.. This is pure gold, precious stuff!! We will have to put it in tiny perfume bottles and charge the same as Dolce Gabbana to break even! Anyway, as someone who has made cookies at his grandfather's cookie factory without much satisfaction or cooked every now and then and made a decent meal, I must say, it is very different to actually grow, harvest and then process a crop and find that it is of a good quality. I watched with pride while they pressed our olives and am quite satisfied with the end result.. Now, all you folks back home need to fly here post haste to try some of our oil before it is all gone!
I think that our wine will also be quite drinkable, so maybe we will have 2 successes in a terrible year of drought. As I told the owner of the frantoio or olive pressing facility, if the oil is good, it is not anything I did, rather it is from Il Signore, but I still was happy to be part of it.
Friday, I am quite excited to see the Sullivans in Rome and try to guide them about around the city to places they won't see with their tour. I will try to take them a little bottle to try and then you can ask them how it was.
Our friend Luisa is visiting now from Portici and we will have a fun week ahead. Also some honeymooners are joining us on Friday from America; of course, that is the day I will be heading to Rome, but I will be back Saturday night to visit with them.
We met again with our agronomists who will help us decide what fertilizer to put on our fields before planting and where to place each type of grapevine on the hill.. and also how to obtain as much help as possible from the government. This is a bit like farmers in america who are subsidized and for once, I am totally in favor of such sublidies... just don't tell anyone!
dds