Olive picking on Hvar Island, Croatia.

My family owns a few small plots of land with olive trees in the little village of Zastražišće on the island of Hvar in Croatia. The sleepy village really comes back to life this time year with an influx of family and friends helping with the harvest. This is the first year that we have picked olives from our own trees. That includes me too.

We have about 40-ish olive trees but only 14 are maintained and ready to harvest. The 14 maintained trees yield enough oil for our personal consumption. This year, three generations of family worked together on harvesting.

The five of us plus my parents spent about five days harvesting the olives. We used our barehands and/or a little rake to pull off the olives and placed a mesh mat under the trees to catch our bounty.

Lots of chit chatting while picking from these two.

The haul from our olive harvest. Ready to get picked up by the olive oil pressor in town.

Our olives were transported in this sweet yellow hightop VW Vanagon.

According to the scale, we came in at just under 600 kilograms.

Dan is working on a video to go along with this post. That’s him filming. And that’s my dad waiting his turn on the press. And that’s little Luka eating a popsicle after breakfast. Ha.

While we wait, we decided to go on a little hike to see the oldest olive tree on Hvar. One of the oldest in all of Croatia, I’m sure.

This tree is supposedly 2500 years old and still produces olives. It belongs to my uncle, Barba Tiho.

And here it is! A small bottle from the 75 liters we produced from our 14 olive trees. So fresh, so green, so perfect. I will never look at an olive tree the same after this experience.

Here a couple little videos I made that you can check out while we wait for Dan to finish the real vlog.

Thanks for following,
Marlene