Olives are now bottled

These are the green olives from our olive harvest.  They had to be kept soaking for a few more days than the black olives in order to eliminate the bitterness. Both lots of olives are now bottled and we do indeed have a great crop this year. I don’t think we will need to buy…

The olives are ready for pickling

Arriving back from my holiday I realised it was well and truly time to pick our olives, before the bower birds consumed them.  There has been a flock of bower birds hanging around the garden and they have successfully demolished all our cauliflower plants, each one stripped to a stalk. The olive tree has produced…

Now that is a decent sized jar!

Our olive tree has now seriously started to produce fruit.  I have posted in previous years how we only had a few olives as it was a  very young tree and so we only ever had small jars of olives.  This year we had a good crop and have been able to preserve a large…

Olives are now ready to eat.

We can’t believe how delicious our olives are.  If you are a regular reader of this blog you will know that we bottled some of our home grown olives back in early June.  If you are new to the blog you can check how I bottled them here. Well  we decided it was about time…

I said I would get back to the olives so here I am.

The recipe I used is the same as this one, ours was from the plant tag on the tree. You can click on the recipe above to make it easier to read. I have discovered that the most important aspect of the process is the slitting of the olives as that allows the bitterness to…

I think of Popeye when I think of olive oil!

Not that we are likely to be producing any olive oil but we have managed to harvest some olives from our little olive tree. I wrote previously about how we needed to net the tree to protect it from the parrots. This is our harvest. Not a great deal, about 180 olives or enough to…