Ferda and I have four olive trees on a small piece of land in Geyikbayırı. Some years we don’t make it up there at all and let the neighbors harvest the olives. Some years we get a group of friends, and everyone takes some olives home to cure for eating. This year we decided to see if we could get some oil. The day was a surprising success.
We rented a car, drove up to Geyikbayırı, and borrowed some equipment from a neighbor. The important things here were a ladder, a fairly large tarp, and a small rake-like tool that you can pull through the branches and pull off olives. I doubt it was much before 10am by the time we started picking olives. Ferda and I were at it all day until after sunset. Yeliz came up in the morning and brought us breakfast. Seda showed up in the afternoon with the kids. They weren’t much help at all and got bored fairly quickly, but Seda certainly helped picking olives.
From this effort we ended up with 112kg of olives. There were still lots of olives on the tress, but we were out of time. Also, the olives that were left were mostly the difficult to reach ones. It would be good to hire an expert one year and see how they manage to clean the olives off the trees so well. We know they do ’cause we told the neighbors to collect the rest of our olives and give us a share for eating. Our share ended up being 10kg. When we went up to get those olives, we saw that there were hardly any olives left on our trees. How did they do that?
When you mill olives, you want to do it the same day that you pick them. We packed the car, returned everything to the neighbor, and had a longer drive than expected to the mill in Döşemealtı. I have visited one of these mills near the Aegean where it seems like every third village has an olive mill. That’s certainly not the case in Antalya where there are fewer olive trees (many more oranges and pomegranate here). We had called the mill to be sure they’d be open, and they said that they’re near the entrance to Döşemealtı. Well, that turned out to be on the far side from Antalya. It was certainly dark by the time we arrived, but we managed to find the place, Döşemealtı Zeytinyağı Fabrikası.
There we learned that we had 112kg of olives and that the minimum they mill is 200kg. Ferda asked around and found two guys who let us join them. The place was crowded, and we had to wait perhaps two hours before our turn came. At the last minute an older couple showed up with only 36kg, and they joined us as well. It was nice that all the olives in our pool (of 405kg) from four places looked the same.
Finally the excitement starts. Dumping the olives into the first large sink thing:
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