Harvesting Olives and Making our own Olive Oil!
On our land here in Alentejo, Portugal, there are 54 Olive trees. Just a couple of weeks ago, we planted 15 more. Since we moved in 2022, we did not have a good year for olives yet, but this year 2025 was different. After summer, we started to see the trees loaded with beautiful looking olives. Gorgeous! We got really excited and decided to do our first big olive harvest, with the idea to both make table olives and olive oil!
Our intention for our olive harvest
Our intention was to harvest our olives manually, without machines, spending as little money as we could. To know what it actually means and what it takes to harvest olives by hand and by ourselves. So we just bought 2 hand olive harvesting rakes and our kind neighbour lent us her olive harvest net.
The process to harvest our olives
Timing : we started at the very end of december and finished early january.
Process : to harvest the olives from the tree, the first thing is to lay the net under the tree. It seems easy but for many of our trees, the net would not cover the whole area where the olives could fall. So we sometimes ended up harvesting one side, then move the net and harvest the other side.
We would either collect by hand or with the rake, grabbing one or several branches in one hand to maintain the olives in position, and raking them out with the other hand. This seems trivial but this little trick made a huge difference in efficiency. If you just rake through the branches without holding them, harvesting takes much much longer.
Also, as many of our trees are pretty tall, we had to climb to try reach the olives of the superior branches. By doing it you realize the difference it makes to prune the trees in order to facilitate the harvest.
Once done, we tried to group the olives in little mounds on the net, and put them in 2 buckets. Every time our 2 buckets were full, we would empty them on a net we laid down on gravel in front of our house.
Duration : we wished we had done it faster, but we did our harvest in 3 days. This is also why we progressively laid the olives on a net, instead of putting them directly in bags. They would have started to rot much faster.
Number of trees : out of our 54 trees, not all of them had olives. We did the best we could and probably ended up harvesting olives on 35 trees.
Number of kilos : we ended up harvesting 146.4 kilos of olives!
Pressing our olives to make olive oil
We put the olives in bags and brought them to a local press, or “lagar”. In our region, most presses take your olives and mix them with everybody elses. We found one that press only your olives, so you get your own olive oil. There are pros and cons for each option.
Regular collective press : it is free but they take a significant share of the oil, often more or less half of it. Also, depending on the cultivars of your trees and the quality of your olive trees, mixing it with others might be beneficial for the taste of the oil. Nevertheless, as the oil ccan be given to you weeks later, you can only trust the press as you cannot be fully certain the oil you get is actually the oil that was pressed on site.
Modern press we found : you get your own olive oil, which is is the only way to fully control the quality of the oil. The modern pressing process is also better to retain more nutrients from the olives. On top of that, you can get your oil and enjoy it right away. But quality comes at a price, and at this specific press, rate is 140€ for pressing up to 1000 kilos of olives, plus 1€ per bottle of 5 liters needed.
How many liters of olive oil did we get?
We ended up with 28 liters of our very own olive oil! Tired but very very happy! This has been a fantastic experience for us, and we will definitely do it every year from now on. If there are olives on the trees!
Check the video below to learn more about our 2025/2026 olive harvest in Alentejo.
The next step for us is to taste the oil of course, but also to test it. Out of curiosity, we want to know its nutritive values and know if it is extra virgin or not. Finally, if you are interested in this experience and want to participate in the olive harvest with us, feel free to contact us.