Getting Ready for the Harvest

Nets, ladders, green plastic crates - all I have to buy now are the gloves with plastic dimples all over the palm and fingers. You grab your laden branch with one hand, as close to the trunk as you can get, and drag it through the other, closed, hand letting the olives fall onto the net at the bottom of the tree. A subtle grip takes off the olives but doesn't strip the leaves and shoots. Too many leaves and shoots landing among the harvested olives and caustic remarks start to be made. There are usually three or four pickers to a tree and a clumsy branch stripper reflects on them all.

Before the weekend there is a giant vat of boar stew to make (the hunters kindly delivered our portions cleaned, jointed and in bags ready to go straight into the freezer). Then some fennel under bechamel sauce - good with the strong taste of wild boar and the fennelliness makes the local red taste even better. Restaurants offer boar cooked with black chocolate; I tried it once, disgusting, it just sounds luxurious. The meat sauce is all bagged up in meal-sized doses in the freezer, and I'm going to cheat and buy the pasta. I can't face making the spreads and stuffings from various creatures' innards that go on the toast, so it's cheating there too. Cheese and autumnal local fruit for afterwards keeps it simple. We have to get those olives in.

And if people are kind enough to come all the way from England to help they need to wonder why they didn't choose to be Tuscan peasants; no mercy must be shown to their livers, either.