The 2015 Olive Harvest has begun!

What a wonderful day we had on Saturday 21 March at Kangaroo Valley Olives HQ. It was our inaugural Foodscape Tours olive harvest event and it was a fabulous day. The harvest team was made up of both locals and visitors (including Patti who was here from the US for work!) and also food writer Liz, and Peter, who form the team at Bizzy Lizzy’s Good Things.

We’d like to thank grower Brenda Sambrook for hosting us on her property, one of the olive farmers that make up Kangaroo Valley Olives, and also her farm manager Dean.

The harvesters arrived to enjoy morning tea, a briefing on the day ahead and then we hit the groves, where we took instruction from both Dean and Brenda on what and how to pick. We focused on the leccino trees, an olive usually pressed and made for oils, but that KVO will be experimenting with for table olives.

Back in the processing room we weighed each person’s olive bag, with harvester Paul awarded the top prize, picking 4.11 kilos in the hour we spent in the groves. All up the group picked an impressive 44 kilos – apparently a good haul, with high quality fruit selected! In the processing room we learnt about the process for taking the table olives from the tree to the table, and also about pressing olives for oil.

This was followed by a tasting of the extensive range of KVO products and then we sat down to a delicious lunch of slow roasted lamb shoulder, potatoes, carrots, salads and breads. To top it all off we finished with cake; the hit being my mum Rita’s Beetroot Chocolate cake!

We hope to do this again next year. We can’t wait!