Olive picking

Its Olive harvest time here and everyone is working really hard to collect them in. It is a very heavy manual process still and so they are all very tired at the end of the day. The photographs show the Kritsotakis family collecting their olives.



All sorted and ready to start...









If only the generator would fire up......













At last...













Where did Manolis go? Oh...he's in the tree now! (look hard!)

















Now there's a surprise, the woman has to do the tidying up....





The happy family, left to right - Manolis, Yiannis and Elleni.





The trees being harvested are some of the oldest in the village and the big one behind the family portrait estimated to be at least 400 years old. Yiannis tells me he has around 400 trees some of which he has had for about 25 years since his father gave him them. The average yield per tree is 30 to 40 kilos of olives, but in a good year could be as much as 100 kilos. 10 kilos of olives makes 1 kilo of olive oil.

Thanks to the family for their help.

Keep watching for the report from the olive oil factory.