For context: Today was possibly the penultimate day of harvesting our own olives, although there may be a few more trees we may need to do for friends and family over the next few days as well...
Today we have started the third round of #olive picking. I'll see if I can post the occasional picture, might have to fill in ALT text when I'm home (it's tricky to keep on taking off gloves).
We don't just harvest fully manually with those olive picking combs, as that would take forever:
We also use a couple of battery powered olive harvesters. These have 8 carbon fibre rods, which oscillate rapidly, shaking the olive off the tiny branches they are attached to.
Even so, it took about 90 minutes for 3 people to harvest that one tree on the right.
In-between harvesting each tree the olives have to be picked up from the netting, filled into buckets and transported over to a trailer using a wheelbarrow.
Finally the now empty nets are moved to the next tree.
Here you can see a bit better how we spread out the nets to catch as many #olives as possible.
Someone still has to pick up all the ones that decide to fly even further or slip through the gaps between the nets.
All the buckets full of olives and leaves get poured onto the metal grill where someone (in this case me) has to try to separate them from each other by rubbing manically while wearing leather gloves.
We then put the leaves into boxes to feed them to our #goats.
I've had yet another looong and tiring day of olive harvest today, but having a whole bunch of fresh #Faircamp releases to listen to made for a fun day of work!
I've been listening to #RadioFreeFedi all day during #OliveHarvest, but couldn't use my phone's touchscreen while wearing gloves, so I thought it'd be a great day for field testing my #RFF display prototype, using a #Pimoroni Pico Inky Pack E-paper display for the #RaspberryPiPico.
It shows the currently playing track, lets me switch between main, comfy and specialty, and I can generate a QR code to take me straight to the artist profile or their music.