20 litres of extra virgin

Saturday was the scheduled day for taking the olives we'd helped pick during the week down to the olive mill - the appointment for the pressing wasn't until 6.30pm though, so we had enough time to do a few other things earlier in the day.

First on our to-do list was to give Reggie a good walk in the morning. He has been very patient throughout the week, being left in the house on his own for long stretches of time and not always getting a decent walk each day, so we owed him a good run around somewhere leafy. Of course, we had to stop at our local café, Da Nerone, first to give ourselves a quick injection of caffeine ready to wake us up for the day. After that, we headed up the hill through Vellano to the cava (quarry) track, and let Reggie run around off the lead, crunching through fallen leaves and clambering the steep banks either side of the path.

Once back from our dog walk, I set to updating the blog for the past week while Stuart drilled and hammered making some more progress on the shed.

Before we knew it, it was lunchtime, so we had a quick lunch (egg mayonnaise sandwiches in the warm sunshine on the patio) before getting back to it. Immediately after lunch, I helped Stuart fix the new perspex canopy above the front door - we already have a canopy similar to this above the apartment door, its purpose being to protect our beautiful handmade chestnut doors from the elements. Despite their obvious purpose, though, these canopies are officially not allowed - when The-Man-From-Florence came for his inspection we had to make sure that the one above the apartment had been taken down and hidden away, which is why we haven't got around to putting one above our own front door until now (as we understand -hopefully correctly- that we will not be subject to any further official inspections). We think it actually looks quite nice - and it serves a purpose.

Once that was done, Stuart got back to work on the shed while I busied myself moving some logs (which Mum and Dad had brought down from further up the terraces) down from the first terrace to the wood pile area, with the intention of splitting them. However, by the time I'd finished moving them, time had marched on and we were soon due to leave for the Phillipses. We'd offered to go and help continue picking olives for the afternoon and help with the bagging up etc., so while I secured the chickens in their house, Stuart put away his tools and we headed off down the hill to Pescia.

On arrival at the Phillips house, we walked in to find Chris laid up on the sofa with a bag of ice on his ankle - that didn't look good! Just minutes before we arrived he had hobbled into the house after having fallen a very short distance from one of the olive trees, landing awkwardly on his ankle. He was in a lot of pain and the jury was out on just how much damage he had done. So, leaving Chris languishing on the sofa, Stuart, Sue and I headed up to the olive trees. There would be no more picking with Chris out of action but there were a few cut branches still to strip, after which we sorted through the pile of olives, picking out leaves and twigs and bits of moss before loading up crates and sacks and heaving them all back down the terraces. Never mind going to a gym for weight training - all you need to do is fill a crate or sack full of olives and you have a full-on workout!

Once all the crates and sacks were assembled on the terrace outside Chris and Sue's house, we went indoors to check on the invalid and drink well-earned cups of tea/coffee.

This is what 322kg of olives looks like.

The next job was to cart all of the crates and sacks down the hill as far as the cars, so once we had regrouped and gathered our strength, we started lugging the 322kg of olives down to the cars. Despite all of our protests, Chris decided to attempt to stand on his swollen ankle and like a true warrior he hobbled slowly down the hill with sacks of olives on his shoulders while the rest of us ferried the rest of the crates and sacks down to the cars.

With the cars loaded and the sun setting, we felt a celebration was in order, so a quick glass of prosecco was dispatched before it was time to head to the mill in our heavily olive-laden cars.

Sunset over Pescia.

On arrival at the mill, we unloaded the contents of the cars onto two pallets, which were then taken to be weighed before we emptied all the sacks and crates into a large hopper. From the hopper, the olives went off up a conveyor belt to be shaken, for the leaves and debris to be removed via a suction pipe, and to pass through a water bath to be washed.

After the washing process, the olives were piped via a hammer crusher to what looked like a giant mixing machine for the 'kneading' part of the process - we could see in through the glass lid and watch the brown olivey sludge being churned around.

This part of the process lasted around 40 minutes, at the end of which the sludgey mixture was piped into another huge machine, the centrifugal extractor, before being piped to the final part of the processing machinery, the separator, and finally pouring out as liquid green gold - our hard earned extra virgin olive oil (of which about 3% came from our own olives)!!

When our oil had all poured into the large steel container, it was weighed again: we had 51kg, giving us an oil-to-olives ratio of around 15.5% - pretty good!

It was then up to us to use the funnels and jugs to fill up our own containers with our oil. Chris and Sue calculated that Stuart and I had picked enough olives to have around 20 litres for ourselves, so we bought a 25 litre container from the mill and filled it with our oil, after which we helped pour all of the rest into Chris and Sue's containers.

51kg of oil.

By the time we'd finished the whole process it was around 8pm and we were all feeling weary, so we said our goodbyes and thanked Chris and Sue for involving us in the whole process and headed home with our precious canister of oil.

Of course, the first thing we did when we got home (after feeding Lucca, Florence and Reggie) was to slice some bread and pour some oil into a saucer to taste it. While the oil is so green and thick it could almost be mistaken for stagnant pond water, the taste is delicious: very peppery and fresh, and far better than anything we've ever tasted from a supermarket. Of course, it tastes all the better for knowing that we'd help pick the olives ourselves.

Liquid gold.

After that, we lit the fire, cooked some dinner and sat down with a glass of wine to reflect on our long and tiring but enjoyable day.

Sunday started bright and early with the all-new animal rounds: let the cats out (which entails holding the cat flap open for them while they gingerly sniff around it before they eventually decide they feel brave enough to exit through it), go up to the chicken enclosure to open the door to the chicken house so they can come out, and then go back to the house to get Reggie up, letting him out of his crate and into the garden for a quick circuit of the lawn before he comes running back in for his breakfast.

After we'd had a leisurely breakfast ourselves, Stuart set to work on the shed roof while I spent a while trying to split the logs that I'd moved from the terrace yesterday - with varying degrees of success.

We headed to Amanda's at around midday to pick up some food for lunch - today we chose to sample three very different dishes featuring enormous prawns, pork meatballs and calves liver - then came back home to heat the dishes through before enjoying them in the sunshine and fresh air on the patio.

After lunch, Stuart headed up the drive to cut down an old chestnut tree that he'd had his eye on for firewood for a while, following which I spent a couple of hours ferrying all the logs back down the driveway to the woodpile and then splitting them. Chestnut is a very axe-friendly wood, and when it comes to log splitting the axe goes through it almost like a knife through butter, with even the very knotty pieces easier to split than many of the rock hard acacia logs that I'd been battling with earlier in the morning, all of which meant that I had a far more productive afternoon than the morning.

While I split wood, Stuart turned his attention back to the roof of the shed, and by 4pm we had an almost complete and almost water-tight roof on our shed, complete with brown felt covering to keep the comune happy.

We packed away our tools just before 4pm so that we could take Reggie out for a walk before the daylight faded. We headed up the road to the track by the quarry above Vellano and had a nice quiet walk there - noticing how much the landscape is changing now that a lot of the leaves have come off the trees, exposing views that we haven't seen since last winter.

The whole footpath is a russet-coloured carpet of crunchy leaves.

When we got to the end of our walk, we headed back down the hill but instead of going straight home we took a turn off the road to go to Donatella's house. Since poor Donatella broke her ankle almost 5 weeks ago, we've constantly been on the go with olive picking, shed building, visitors and more visitors, and we haven't had a chance to pay her a proper visit. We called in today for just a flying visit, but it was good to see both Donatella and her Mum, and hopefully now that things are starting to slow down a bit for us we will be able to see more of her. We were treated to a coffee and a delicious slice of crostata while we had an all-too-brief catch-up with Donatella before leaving to rescue poor Reggie who was waiting patiently in the car.

By the time we left Donatella's darkness had fallen, so it was straight home to pour a glass of wine and spend an evening relaxing by the fire.