Olives

t is no secret that I really miss gardening. I make do with my little terrace window boxes, but they certainly don´t scratch the itch of growing and storing your own food. However, I have managed a bit of this by collecting olives. My first winter here, I noticed that a nearby park had been built around an older, existing olive grove. I watched carefully, and noticed that in the late winter, the birds were feasting on the olives, so clearly the city did not pick them. I had seen people who did not look like locals (as evidenced by their headscarves) picking them, so the following year I did too.

I picked 5 kg of olives this fall. That is a LOT.

Processing olives to make them edible is time consuming work, as I knew from the one time I ordered a delivery of raw olives in the US. After picking, you sort by size and variety, prick or cut the skin of every fruit, then soak them in water. This water must be changed daily for 2-4 weeks, until the bitter compounds have been leached out sufficiently to make them edible. If you try to eat an olive off the tree, you will spit it out immediately - it is that astringent. After the many soaking, you marinate the olives in salt, vinegar, and flavourings, and in just a few more months, you have tasty olives to share. This is not for the faint of heart, or for those who can´t abide a bucket of olives in the kitchen for a month, but it definitely feels close to gardening.