Anne's Daily Encounters

By dutchdelight

Olives Harvest started

First days of November, the tourist seasons ended and now the land calls for the harvest of the olives and oranges and lemons.

Sweetheart isn't much of a walker anymore, so I often make my walks alone. Today I took to the suburb of Chaleppa and further on and the nice thing of these suburbs is, that the original agricultural character of those places is still easily found, in the fields with olive trees or citrusfruit trees.

I heard the machines of the wheeling rakes that sweep the olives from their branches and walked into the olive grove where I found two men at work with rake-machines on a stick.
I used to rake the olives from the branches with a special comb and that's still done. Just the olives high up in the tree won't be reached with a comb or rake, and are swept out by such a 'wheeling rake'  like the man, Yorgos, holds.
Up in the tree is his co-operator; both work under contract for someone who owns the land and trees ~ there are quite a number of farmworkers who migrate like in John Steinbeck's book 'The grapes of wrath'... Well,  migration here on Crete seldom is far away, as the island is 1/3 of the Netherlands.
In the extra one bag filled with olives, it will weigh 40-50 kilos, and the plastic underneath and around the trees to collect the olives swept down and ofcourse than it's the handwork of putting those olives into the sack

thank you all lots for your reactions and **s on yesterblip from a village here on Crete.

It's 22.00 hrs now that I'm posting today's blip and outside not a hand can be seen in the thick and thick fog, what's folded out over NW Crete... I'd seen it laying across the valleys in the mountains and more West than Chania, but now it's covering us too.

LOOK! In France collecting olives alike!

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