Olive harvesting

This is a step by step gallery of olive harvesting, as practiced in the village Samiko in the Peloponnese, Western Greece.

Preparation

• 
  The olive pickers access the olive grove, usually by pick-up truck.
• 
  First action is to lay out the olive nets and sheets on the ground.
• 
  Some of the olive branches are sawed off, in this way serving both pruning and facilitation of picking.
• 
  The branches and some olives have now fallen on the nets.

Harvesting

• 
  Handheld mechanical tools are often used to speed up the picking process.
• 
  Cut branches are passed through a special harvesting machine to remove and collect the olives.

Harvested olives

• 
  The olives are gathered into piles by lifting and shaking the corners of the nets.
• 
  Olives are transferred to jute or synthetic sacks and loaded onto the pick-up truck, to be carried to the oil press.

Post-harvest works

• 
  Excess branches are burnt with special care so that the fire does not spread.
• 
  The olive pickers are "rewarded" with a rainbow in the sky when leaving the olive grove:)