The pressing of time

you could call it a place of dreams, you could call it many things. hopes flourish and fade, and flourish again. money changes hands, and all to the grinding whir of the great stone wheels, pulleys, and hiss of steam. this is the world of the olive lagar.

you can guess how many you've got before you go, you can try and weigh them, you can estimate what percentage of oil you might get from them, but until you are there, you will never really know.

for some, its a few days, for others a couple of weeks, and for some it might be months, before you get to the lagar and get them all pressed.

the wait is agonising, worrying whether or not you have enough, whether they will have gone off before your appointment, whether you wont even get them all off the trees before they rot, or fall off. whether the weather will be with you or against you, or somewhere in-between.

you visit the lagar and get told your appointment is now not possible. they will telephone later to tell you when to come. later comes and goes, and still no phone-call.

you phone them and they are still not forthcoming. you wait some more.

and then the day arrives. you load up, and head off. first to another lagar, only to find them in an even more chaotic state than the one with whom you had an appointment. machinery has broken down here too, and thirty men stand around arguing at the tops of their lungs with the owner "why does it take so long?". you take a ticket, and go. 30 people ahead of you. no chance today there.

then back to the lagar you chose first. the one with the most old fashioned machinery. the one everyone says tastes best, and lasts longest.

then at the lagar you can't make yourself understood, and your appointment that should have been the day before, seems somehow to have been shunted still further forward. they're not ready for you, and they don't know when they will be.

you have, of course, double booked yourself, and are running out of time. more people begin to arrive. trucks spewing out olives, people with loads ten times the size of yours. people in suits, and people in beaten up old work wear, people in brand new executive cars, and people on tractors, and everything in-between. how will it ever happen for you? pressure mounts on and on, time runs through your fingers like the oily slick of black water that runs across the floor. you stand and fret, no one understands your mountain dialect, or your pidgin Portuguese, you might as well be from mars.

one minute there's no room for your whole truck full of olives, and then something happens, and by some miracle you're given a crate and you off load your much worried about cargo.

now to find out how much they really weigh. is it anywhere near what you hoped? nearly 400 kilos this year (368 if you wanna be precise) in old money thats over 800 lbs, wow. so much more than last year. we did it, the first bit.

now you can go, still no idea of how long the wait until they're pressed. no one can tell you, but at least you can breakfast now.

a few hours later you return, still no news. time running out, you wont be able to get back here to get the oil because you wont be here, unless they can do it soon.

and then it happens again, a miracle, twice in one day. and this time in a completely different way, someone recognises you, someone you spoke to last year, someone who took you under their wing, who saw your frailty, who recognised something in you they wished to help. you tell them of the problems you have had.

"calm" they say, and repeat like a mantra. "calm", always easy to say, and hard to find.

they go off, and you see them speaking with the owner, the owner who's ear you could not get, who understood none of your words, understands his every word. and there it happens before your eyes, of all the hundred crates and pallets waiting to be washed and loaded into the machine, they pick yours.

anyone would forgive you for crying. how can this be? after all this time. and a few simple words from a kind stranger and everything is changed, your whole life regains its balance and composure.

you are elated.

this is the moment you have waited for all year. the moment your olives are pressed into oil. your oil, from your olives.

through the washer, round the spin cycle, and up the hopper into the stone grinding mill.

they tumble out a few at first, then almost a cascade, but steady. mashed and scraped, and cockscrewed up into the machine that spreads the paste out like primula cheese onto the mats.

the mats stack, and keep stacking. then trolley across the floor into the press.

massive hydraulic pressure bears down on the mats with your olive paste. a tarry black sludge like crude oil pours out.

separated twice with hot water. first in a tank then a centrifuge, finally your oil pours forth.

how much, the big question. watch the hydrometer the man says.

10, 20, 30 40, 42 and that's all she wrote. not bad, not bad at all.

you get given a glass of wine by another old man, a handshake and a slap on the back. that's it for this year, the company of strangers never tasted so good.

A short film about olive pressing

When Rick has recovered sufficiently from the whole olive experience (read, finished whittling spoons out of olive wood), He's going to write a post about the pressing. Meanwhile, here's something I prepared earlier......

when in doubt, cook, then eat

Nothing much to report from the farm, we are still waiting for the call from the lagar about getting our olives pressed. All the olives are bagged up and ready to go. Been a rainy day anyway and when stuck inside, what I do is cook.......
Tonight's feast consisted of:

Fragrant Thai green curry




Followed by:

Panettone bread and butter pudding



Yeah I know seems a strange thing to have after a curry, but we are not spoilt for choice and when the inspiration takes you, you have to go for it.

olives

Well we have finished picking the olives, through torrential rain, autumn sun and gale force winds, what a week. Hanging in trees is fun when the wind isn't blowing, it's downright scary when it is and today, it blew, it still blows. it's been a trying time all round. The puppy has made it vaguely amusing and at times extremely annoying, lying all over the nets and the olives, not moving off when you need him to, going underneath the net and getting all tangled up. The nets are 6mx6m, very slipperry, impossible to get a hold off with sore, rough hands, comical to set up when the wind is blowing hard, you're on a very steep terrace with a big drop down and a bloody (big) puppy rolling all over it having a ball........
We think, although we won't know until we get to the mill that we've got in the region of 400 kg, which may sound like a lot, but the lagar requires between 300 and 500 kg for a single pressing, so fingers crossed we've hit the mark.
Will post pics of the process on Friday, meanwhile back to the other work.

The only woofers we'll ever have

Today we had our first full day of picking, we're working on someone else's farm. The terraces are so much nicer than ours, almost flat and wide, makes life alot easier for harvesting olives. The dogs found a new friend to play with, barked most of the day, seemingly at nothing and constantly ran all over the olives or lay down on top of them all....ahh the joys....

Fungi foray

here are some of the best edible fungi that are currently available in the outdoors shop.


first we have the Bay Bolete, close family of Porcini, aka the Cep, this one found in mixed woodland. a good addition to your dried mushroom stock, for soup and rissoto.



next we have the Cep, the most important culinary mushroom, bar none.
the best mushroom for slicing and drying, an essential soup ingredient, and better yet in a wild mushroom rissoto,
even better dried and rehydrated than fresh, as something happens in the drying process that intensifies the flavor. found in broad leaf woodland, particularly oak, chestnut, and beech (try finding beech here).


and finally, we have the premier bracket fungus, the Beefsteak fungus. found usually a couple of feet off the ground, and repeatedly growing on the same tree. remember the tree and you can cut and come again, often the same year. grows on oak and chestnut. when cut it bleeds just like meat, and as the name suggests has something in common with beefsteak, not just looks but flavor and texture. stick it in a pan with bacon, the only way to have it. watch it sizzle.


the thing with fungi is that they often act symbiotically with their host tree, by removing the fruiting body your are helping the mycelium (the web of fungus) spread, inadvertently, by releasing spores from the fruit.

Less Fiat 500 more Phutt 500

I love these cars, they are parked in a derelict used car lay-by on the N17. I feel so sorry for them, they look all neglected and lonely, and yet still so jolly and colourful and still stylish (in my opinion, anyway). I wish I had nothing better to do than to restore them all to their former glory.
Luckily for all concerned none of these cars had engines....a minor problem obvioulsly, however am still on the look out for something cheap and silly to have here as my other cheap and silly car is living in the UK......

Fruity poo

I have been working on transforming the last piece of wilderness on meadow one.



Kind neighbours and friends have been giving me cuttings and runners of raspberries, loganberries and blackcurrants. I also had some of my own which needed moving, now is the time to do it and coincided nicely with 2 fruit planting days. However, I needed poo. Monday was poo collecting day which I did, I also moved 5 barrows of the stuff from the top of our property to the bottom, those of you that have visited know that it's not easy terrain, the going down bit wasn't too bad as once the brakes are on the barrow it pretty much just needs steering, garvity and momentum do the rest. Taking the empty (thankfully) barrow back up is the hard bit, luckily there's not a lot of passing traffic on the road at the top as I may have been run over several times, due to lying all over the road panting and sweating!!
Anyway all the plants are now in and nicely dressed with poo, a small patch left to dig over for anymore plants I want and a great place for the dogs to trample and ruin.....

The zen of cutting wood

Why chop wood?
What is the point of it? why bother when electric and gas power are so relatively cheap? why go to all that effort?
These are some questions you might well ask yourself, or be faced with at some point.
The answers, typically, are often not all that obvious.
Today I cut and chopped what I hope will be about enough wood for the next month. Here, we use wood for fuel, to keep warm; to heat water for dishes and to make hot drinks; to dry clothes and towels; to dry nuts and fruit and mushrooms, eggshells for chicken feed supplement, and maybe meat if we get the chance; and to cook with. The list goes on, we keep adding things to it when the opportunity arrises. when we eventually move into the house I am building, we plan to do all of the above, and heat enough water to shower with.
I felled our own pine, hurled it down one mountainside, carried it across a meadow, then up another mountainside, where I cut it and chopped it for firewood. if that sounds like a lot of effort, it was. but effort that is hard to price.
Wood out here is valued from about £35 a cord for pine, on up. it took me about half a day to cut and chop and pile about a half a cord, excluding the time it took to get it to the wood pile, the felling, the the limbing, the carrying, the disposal of the brashings, and the collection of the pine cones for fire lighters.
So that makes my day's financial value not even £17.50, or £2.18 an hour, even if I could find a market, and that's without considering the transport cost, or the felling and cutting cost, in terms of petrol and oil, chains, sparkplugs, and any of the sundry things I have to go through in order to do this. axe handle springs to mind.
The reason I do it isn't financial, its because it means something to me. it always has.
I've cut and chopped wood since I was a kid. It was my thing then, and it still is. along with karate it has followed me wherever I go, whether it was cutting firewood at 30 below in the midst of winter in the Canadian north woods, or in 100 degree plus heat in the mountain forests of Portugal. It has been a part of my life for a long time.
Although at first it may seem like it bears no resemblance to karate, it does.
A long while ago, one of my karate instructors talked about karate training as paying into a bank. The bank of karate. you only got something out of it, if you put something in.
Cutting wood is the same. it's hard work. its supposed to be, that is the beauty of it, and it is through the hardness of the work that the meaning of it begins to unfold.

The zen of cutting wood.

The hardness of it is a great constant, no matter how proficient your technique becomes at chopping, or using a saw. It doesn't matter whether you cut with a hand-held crosscut saw, a bow saw or a chainsaw, or chop with an axe, a maul, a hatchet, or a hammer and wedge, the action is the same, the end result is the appreciably the same, the only difference is the method.
As you can probably guess, i am against log splitters driven by power take-off's on tractors; take away the difficulty and you take away the meaning.
It is the meaning that is the point, and the things it facilitates are the things that help us to live comfortably.
The meaning of chopping wood is that it gives you as a person value, a deep reverberating value. A value that you can't qualify in financial terms, because its meaning isn't about money, but about worth.
Worth and money are not the same thing, thou some may substitute one for the other.
If you have never done it, you may wonder how chopping wood could possibly give you value? if you have chopped wood you might understand, or you may not, you may chop wood for years and never realise.
It's value is in the hardness of the task, and the difficulty that it takes. The things we have to overcome within ourselves as much as the thing we are dealing with.
Nothing of worth comes easily, no task undertaken, no risk ventured, no love experienced.
It is only when we struggle that we begin to understand, and the more we struggle the more opportunity we are being given to understand, not that we necessarily do, but we are being given the opportunity.
We begin to understand the value of things, and how they relate to other things.
When we experience difficulty it gives us the opportunity to extend our capability. This is the greatest gift we can be given. Because when we can extend our capabilities it enables us, it enables us to do more, to be more. more alive. It awakens creativity within us. It enables us to more fully become the people we are supposed to be.
Eventually, when you no longer worry about your technique, but are lost in the doing of the task you will understand its value, its way, is beyond technique. It's not so much doing cutting wood, as being cutting wood. and in that moment, like karate, it transcends ordinariness, and becomes zen, a zen thing, and an activity that enables you to appreciably attain a zen oneness of being. A oneness with and of all things.

This is the true value of cutting wood.

Cutting and chopping wood heats you many times. when you go to turn on your central heating, think about this for a moment.