Gardens & Produce
Olives, piri-piri, aloe vera, and a new toilet!
Today I put the olives for eating into jars. They’ve been in water for 2 weeks, with the water being changed every day.
I made up a brine of water with enough salt in it to float a medium-sized peeled potato, and gathered rosemary, bay, garlic and piri-piri from the garden to flavour the olives.
I spooned olives and flavourings into the jars in layers. I used 2 garlic cloves, 2 piri-piri, 1 bay leaf, and one small sprig of rosemary per jar. This is total guesswork, so I need to remember when we eat them to write down if these quantities worked or not.
Then I filled the jars with brine, put the lids on, labelled the jars, and put them in the adega. They’ll be ready for eating in 6 weeks, although I’ve done one jar covered with olive oil and put it in the sun to steep which we will try tonight. The olives have already lost a lot of their bitterness and I’m interested to try really fresh ones!
I’m loving that, apart from the salt, all the ingredients are from our land – even the water 
Thanks to multi-talented Conny Kadia for her eating olives recipe.
I also hung up some piri-piri plants and some bay to dry in the kitchen.
Andy was out having a bonfire of olive prunings and managed to burn himself – eek! So he got Aloe Vera and a bandage for the burn, and home-made raisin bread with our own honey for lunch.
Meanwhile … Jonny’s been making a loveable loo:
Olive Harvest
So the olive harvest is finally over! We worked in sunshine and in torrential rain (“they don’t show this on the adverts” says Emma).
I mostly did the ‘support work’ of keeping up with the everyday tasks and feeding the workers, helping out for short bursts with the olive picking. Andy, Jonny (who’s now living in the cottage), Tommy and Emma (our friends and regular helpers) and Theresa (our German friend / woofer) did most of the picking.
We put the olives through our winnowing machine, which blows out all the leaves, before storing them in huge tubs of water until they are all picked and ready to go to the mill – it took 1 van, 1 jeep, and 1 car to transport the olives to the olive mill (lagar)and us to the café for coffee and cake while we waited our turn for olive pressing.
Finally it was our turn to get our olives pressed (I’m back home by this point, catching up on emails, housework, and making a pizza for celebratory olive harvest dinner).
We have over 900kg of olives which is more than twice as many as we need to get our own pressing, so the oil we get is only from our own organically managed trees.
After a few hours of waiting (the lagar has a bar!) the oil is ready. We have 121 litres!
Home for pizza and a blind olive oil tasting. We used our new oil, our oil from last year, Tommy and Emma’s oil from this year, a cheap supermarket brand (Lidl) and a premium brand (Gallo Extra Virgin). Tasters were me, Andy, Tommy, Jonny, Theresa and our neighbour Dave. Emma did a fine job of keeping a poker face while we were tasting and commenting, so as not to give away which oil was which. Our oil came out favourite with every taster, and Tommy and Emma’s was a close 2nd. All of us got the two supermarket oils the wrong way around, thinking the cheap one was the premium brand (so maybe if you are going to buy mass-produced oil then you might as well go for a cheaper one?!)
And finally … Jonny is convinced he met Robert de Niro’s dad at the olive mill:
If you’d like to taste some fabulous unrefined, unprocessed, unfiltered Portuguese olive oil (from the very same lagar) for yourself, then check out our friends’ website www.quintafelgar.co.uk where you can find a list of UK stockists, or order online.
Szechuan Peppercorns
Harvested our first small crop of Szechuan Peppercorns today! The smell is wonderful
Beware, the plant is very spiky!
We bought our szechuan pepper bush from the Agroforestry Research Trust.
Good article all about them at http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/dec/13/szechuan-pepper-chinese-five-spice
Day at the Olive Mill
Our olives in the hopper.
Going up the conveyor belt to be cleaned and washed.
Then on to wait their turn to be crushed into pulp.
Then here they are being stirred with 43 degree water, to extract the oil. One of these blocks contains our olives crushed into pate!
After about an hour the pulp is pumped into this huge press.
Then the resulting mix of oil and water goes through a centrifuge and out comes our amazing oil.
This then makes its way into a tank, as and when one is available.
And we get to pour this into our own containers.
Beautiful oil, wonderful colour, taste and we know that nothing has gone into it except olives grown on our farm, and handpicked by us.
Harvest Day
We’ve only been picking what we need to eat every day, so today as we have Emma here helping we’re having a harvesting and preserving day. Here’s what we picked:
So we’ve got a lot of ratatouille to make and tomatoes to bottle today.
Matt also harvested 3 frames from the beehives, giving us over 4 kilos of delicious raw honey!
Summer Bounty (almost)
We are just on the edge of summer abundance, with a basket of veg coming out of the garden every day, but not yet enough to start preserving for the winter.
Tomatoes are starting to reach full size, but not yet ripening. When they do, it looks like we will be awash with them (hopefully).
We have been eating courgettes for a couple of weeks, although most plants are only just fruiting now. On sunday we hope to get an old window from the scrap yard to build a solar drier for the July and August bounty.
Cucumbers will be a while yet, as temperatures have only just reached the heights that they like. It still feels moderate to us, while visitors think it is very hot in the day.
Nasturtium flowers are adding a sweet spiciness to our salads.
Young runner beans are crispy but not stringy – wonderful.
We do not have so many strawberries this year, but still we are eating some every day.
Peppers and aubergines have some way to go. They like it HOT. The plants are growing quickly, and will fruit when temperatures go over 30 degrees consistently. We have 160 pepper plants in the gardens!
The wild leeks are flowering, attracting some weird and wonderful insects.
Several of my pumpkins are larger than footballs now – I hope to show them off in the village if they get big enough.
And the 3 sisters bed, with Trail of Tears beans, Hopi blue corn, and a few butternut squashes are looking really good.
