Over breakfast I laid it out straight for David, "Dude, are you going to help with the olive harvest or not? If the answer is no, I'll just stop working myself now because doing it alone, the olives will go rotten before I'm able to pick them all."
David, "yeah, ok. I'll help."
As EarleinDenver astutely pointed out in the comments yesterday, nets usually are involved in picking olvies. For the past two days I've been picking the low hanging branches, thus being able to stand on the ground (no ladder or tree climbing required) holding the basket in one hand directly under the branch (no nets required). But today, David and I were going to have to go up to find olives.
We debated the nets and decided it was time to lay them.
Neither of us like the nets. They are unwieldy and get stuck in every thing. Ours also have lots of big holes, rendering them, well, useless. Plus there's that allergy that David and I both seem to possess for prep-work. You know, like taping the trim and laying plastic before painting or knitting a swatch before starting a sweater.
Our neighbors don't seem to suffer from the same affliction...
Check that out! I've never seen such neatly places nets.
Here's what David and I did..
Let's look at the neighbors again...
That's just incredible. It seems that they believe, like EarleinDenver that the olives magically fall into these nets because after spending the morning placing them, they left - no picking. If this works for them, I'll do the net thing better next year.
At about noon, after recovering from the astonishment of the neighbors nets and realizing that even if the olives just dropped into our expertly placed nets I'd still be picking the olives individually but from the ground, I climbed into the tree. I wasn't that high up so I still held the basket, still picking the olives - individually, by hand, one at a time, still trying not to think about how long this was going to take.
David rambled out and joined me. He climbed up high with a basket and started picking - each olive individually, one at a time, by hand.
We weren't really chatting, we were just picking - each olive individually, one at a time, by hand. After about 20 minutes David hopped out of the tree. Saying nothing he headed for the shed.
He must have been, like me, calculating the time this was going to take, pondering alternative methods to get this done. Because he came back from the shed with
his chainsaw.
Dude knows how to get the job done.
excuse me, is he going to cut down your olivetrees or what? Of course it would be easier next year, if you had no olive trees at all. You could also sell them to your neighbour ;o))
ReplyDeleteThanks for the laughs, always a pleasure to see how you two are making it. The first picture of the nets I was really impressed, then I saw the picture of your nets, almost died laughing, sorry. Please remember, it could always be worse. You could be stuck in a cubicle reading about people picking olives on a hillside in Italy.
ReplyDeleteCan't wait for Part III, EarleinDenver
This is hilarious. Though you have to tell your self that generations, going back to the beginning of time, have been learning how to lay those nets down. For a first generation try I would say that your effort was awesome.
ReplyDeleteCindy