We have moved up in the world of olive farming. In 2017 we started with a few donated bucket and crates, borrowed ladders and our trusty Toyota to convey our small harvest to the Co-Op in Almonte. We only managed to pick about 2-3 buckets a day, which is 40-60 kilograms, sometimes even less, because the olive trees were so bad; too high to reach, too overgrown to produce much fruit and too diseased, full of dead wood.
Three years later we have four people engaged to help picking, we have a jeep and trailer and a proper crate to transport our bounty to the agent, who collects the olives for the factory in Sevilla.
agent’s store 
50 olives = 200g 
bucketfulls 
ready to go 
our female crew 
author
Thanks to our contractor, Antonio Sanchez, who also acts unofficially as our agricultural advisor, our olive trees look much healthier, greener and fuller. The constant pruning that Nigel does all year round is essential to achieve a good balance between too many or too few branches. We still have a long way to go when it comes to shaping and selecting the right branches to keep. And of course it takes time to let fresh regrowth mature to carry fruit.
This year we started harvesting on Wednesday, 9th of September with 2 Spanish workers and Steffi, our all-round talented neighbour. The following Monday, 14th of September, another Spanish worker joined us and now we are 6 persons picking olives every day.
This is necessary, as the sooner the olives are picked the more money we get. The longer they stay on the tree, the lower is their value as they will mature and turn black and our return on them sinks to 20 cent per kilo as opposed to 75 cent per kilo when they are green.
We are lucky in so far that we have bought an olive farm and not a vineyard. Because of the impact of the virus measures being taken to protect the population through restricting gatherings of people and cancellation of festivals the wine consumption is down 40%. Thus the price of grapes has nose-dived. In our region here grapes are being left on the vine, as it just does not pay to even harvest them.
Luckily, olives still seem to be a staple on every table and the price is good this year because the lack of rain, again, means less tonnage is being brought in.
On Friday, 18 September 2020 we had our first rain since the end of May with heavy downpours and stormy conditions. The day before I planted out my second batch of tomatoes this year, hoping to get some fruit, as the days are still hot well into October and November, we will see if it works. I also have four young courgette plants in the garden.
Hail the Archeress
After a hiatus of seven years I have finally dug out my flat bow and home-made arrows again. They are a sorry sight, maimed and broken most of them. But I have set up a target, a dart board, under an olive tree and surprisingly even manage to hit it, now and then. It’s a great, powerful feeling to release an arrow in absolute silence and see it fly, powered by simple force of resistance and leverage. I always have enjoyed this ancient craft of instinctive, traditional archery as it requires concentration and skill. Not for me the various implements like cords and pulleys, bow sights, cams and cables on a compound bow that measure the distance and set the exact force to hit home the arrow. In Ireland I had joined a mad-hatters club of archers in County Longford, the Warriors of Queen Maeve, which were more about the roaming of woods and cracking jokes than the seriousness of notching up points to be the best archer of them all. The attraction was the constant changing of targets, rubber animal shapes in all sizes, from a rat to a standing bear set up in various distances from the shooting positions in the wood, which resulted in contortions, kneeling, crouching, and sideways bending to get a clear view of the target through the trees and undergrowth, sometimes even climbing up on a fallen tree trunk or a platform to shoot up or down hills and valleys. To hit your target was real luck, or skill, or mostly a combination of both, just great fun to challenge yourself not to lose or break the arrow in the process, hence my only four remaining arrows.
So I will have to repair, maybe make some more arrows and practice, practice, practice until I can move up to my stronger bow and execute some serious archery.
Compost Toilet
We are advertising our finca for campers on various sites like pitch-up and areasauto-caravanas.com for people that like a quiet, rural place far from crowds and noise. Occasionally we do get somebody. Since we are not a dedicated camping site and do this only on a trial basis we do not have any services as yet.
In August a huge campervan drove up with seven people, three generations. They were the rather tiny granny and her grandchildren of 18 months and six years; also her three children, two sons and a daughter with her husband. Did you count? They all shared happily this one space, only Spanish are so family-loving. They had all they needed in this campervan and we only supplied water and two hours of generator connection. We don’t really earn anything out of it, it’s the novelty and giving people a choice, when in the high season all camping sites are stuffed full of holiday makers.
Another day one Renault arrived with four French lads and their tents. These were three brothers and a friend, they were really nice and we prepared breakfast for them. They also needed a shower and toilet, which was fine, as we had no guests in the downstairs bedroom. With the Covid-19 drama ongoing we cannot have guests, strangers, sharing a bathroom.
French campers 
tents
When we had Dodi and his tent here for a week, he definitely needed access to a bathroom, which was not possible when we had guests in the house.
Therefore I set upon Nigel with much nagging to build a compost toilet. And so he did, within four days he had constructed a solid building which will withstand any storm. Then the olive harvest started and we (or rather Nigel) have not got around to adding a roof, a proper door and a nice tiled floor, but it will happen.
I am all in favour of a dry toilet, which is by no means a new and radical thing. Compost toilets have been around for donkey’s years but nobody seems to want to invite them into their homes. I have come across them first in the 1990s in the Health Food Store in Berlin I worked. They sold upmarket types for garden sheds and holiday homes. In Ireland I used one in a converted outbuilding on a farm. Also German friends of ours that bought a finca have built a simple one and use it every time they are in the country, until they have modernised the house. A perfect solution for water preservation, no fussy plumbing required, and it provides the garden with manure. There is no smell, as liquids are soaked up by a layer of sawdust. They resulting human manure has to be composted for at least a year to be used in the garden. If you don’t believe me please read for yourself ‘The Humanure Handbook’ from Joseph Jenkins, available from Amazon or separate chapters are free to download.
The Egg Trick
Hens are clever; they hide their eggs in plain sight. We recently found a clutch of 19 eggs, right beside the door to the hen house, under the rose bush. We should have known because previously they hid the eggs around the corner in the rose bush. So without a date on the eggs, how would we know how old they were and if they were still ok to eat? It’s easy. Just put the eggs into a bowl of water and the fresh ones will stay below, see the egg marked ‘new egg’ in the photo, the old ones will float as the gases inside the shell develop. With the floating eggs I made a nice ‘dogs dinner’ scrambled egg. They were all good bar one that smelled like rotten eggs smell. The dogs anyway were delighted about their nice dinner.
19 ‘old’ eggs 
fresh eggs 
all floating eggs cracked 
a dogs dinner
The Casa Halcon Diary 