In my travels, I have been fortunate to visit olive groves in California, Greece, Italy and New Zealand, but this week I journeyed less than 15 miles from my home to participate in my first-ever olive harvest.

I was scrolling through my Facebook feed (yes, I’m old) a few weeks ago when I came across a post from Dark Hollow Farm announcing they were looking for volunteers to help with their olive harvest. I vaguely recalled reading in the local paper some years ago about somebody trying to grow olive trees for oil here in the valley, but I hadn’t heard anything about it since. I thought, “Well, that sounds like an experience I should try,” and so my husband and I signed up for two slots on one day during the two-week harvest calendar. We were advised to arrive at 7:45 a.m. and should plan on picking until 1 p.m., with snacks and drinks provided, as well as whatever gear we might need to pick the olives. Our reward would be a bottle of the extra virgin olive oil made from the fruit we picked, delivered at a special party for volunteers in December.

The sun hadn’t yet risen over the mountains to the east Wednesday morning when I drove to Dark Hollow Farm, but it had washed the clouds in brilliant shades of orange and rose, adding visual warmth to a chilly dawn. Harry had developed a nasty cold, so I was going by myself. I quickly went from the interstate to country roads lined with vineyards, pastures and woods, winding up hills above the Rogue Valley floor until I arrived at my destination just as the sun cleared the horizon.

I parked in a gravel lot next to the olive grove and was greeted by Brian Sephton, owner of the farm along with his wife, Nita Klingenberg, who gave me a five-gallon plastic bucket and a canvas fruit-picking bag, helping me adjust its criss-crossed straps over my back with the bag sitting in front. He followed that with a quick lesson in olive picking:  Grab a branch in one hand just above the olives, and with the other hand strip down the branch, pulling the olives off as you go and letting them fall into the bag strapped to your chest. The branches are supple and springy, and the leaves hold firm (mostly), so all you get are the olives, which were hard and green for the most part, ranging in size from pea to marble to, well, an average olive. Brian further explained that they grow four varieties of olives on the farm — two Italian (taggiasca and maurino) and two Spanish (picual and albequino) — all organic. We would be picking the Spanish olives this day, and I was paired with Jo, another solo lady who had already picked earlier in the week. We worked opposite each other down a row of trees, chatting away and getting to know each other as we moved along.

I was surprised at how hard the olives were and how small some of them were. Brian stressed that we should pick everything, no matter the size or color, and include even ones that fell on the ground or looked like perhaps a bird had pecked them. Olives have a natural antimicrobial quality, so everything is used. The growing season in Oregon is much shorter than in California, where the trees flower in April. In this grove the flowers appear in June, and harvest must occur in October, before the first frost. Picking the olives when they are green results in a more intensely flavored oil that also keeps longer on the shelf.

The trees we were harvesting were fairly young; seedlings spent two years in a greenhouse before the young trees were planted on site, and this was their fourth harvest. Brian said that in their first year they only got about 400 pounds of olives from the entire grove, but this year they had picked about 400 pounds just the day before alone. (My contribution on this day would total about 40 pounds.) Most of the trees stood no taller than us, and we managed to pick those that stretched higher by gently bending the supple branches down to strip the olives. We found some trees were thickly covered in fruit while others had very few olives, which we plucked one by one rather than using the stripping method. Brian said that the trees tend to be cyclical, having one heavy year followed by a year when the fruit is light. Either way, we found it to be elusive; you could swear you had picked every last olive and searched every quarter of the tree three times over, and then find several more when you went back and checked later.  Sometimes we were on our knees, as the branches stretched all the way to the ground and that proved the easiest, most comfortable way to sweep the olives into our bags. Other times we were on tip-toe, standing at the top of the berm on which the trees were planted to reach the highest fruit.

We periodically emptied our bags into our buckets, releasing the buckles at the sides of the bag to let the olives ping into the bucket through the bag’s open bottom. When the buckets were full, after about 90 minutes of picking, we brought them to be weighed by Brian’s daughter, Anna, so that they could keep track of just how much fruit each row produced. We continued in this fashion the rest of the morning, pausing occasionally for a snack bar and water and to gaze out over the orchard and vineyards below. (Dark Hollow also produces organic grapes and wine.) I loved to see how the terrain changed as the light did throughout the day, the dry, late fall hills showing brown and gold with dark patches of oak and pine. As we picked we were treated to a soundtrack of quails calling to each other and jays, chickadees and juncos adding accompaniment as turkey vultures rode the air currents above us and the farm’s dogs sniffed a hello. We stripped off jackets and sweaters as the clouds cleared and the day warmed, thankful for hats to shield us from the sun’s rays.

Just before one o’clock, four of us converged on the last tree in the row to wrap up the picking for the day. We volunteers were done, but Brian, Nita and Anna would continue working, removing any stray leaves from the olives before feeding them into their small Italian olive press to release the oil. EVOO should be milled within 24 hours of picking; Dark Hollow processes each day’s harvest within 8 hours. The oil will then sit and the sediments settle for about a month before it is bottled.

I am certainly looking forward to collecting my “pay” in December; and although the work was hard, I enjoyed being out in the open air, surrounded by nature. I’d like to make this an annual ritual, a fitting end to the growing year. And we’ll definitely have to stop in at the tasting room to sample some of Dark Hollow’s wines as well!

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor