Buying an olive grove, growing and picking your own olives, taking them to the village press and then cooking your fresh vegetables from your garden in your own home grown organic olive oil. It all sounds so romantic doesn’t it? That’s what I thought too when my boyfriend Sezgin took me round a property in his village early last summer. The 4 acre plot consisted of three acres of olive grove and another acre with a village house and citrus garden on it. The olive trees took my breath away. They were not the stunted, twisted dwarfish trees that I had grown up seeing in Cyprus but huge 60 footers soaring above me. The ground below them was vaulted by the arch of their branches, it seemed a sacred place to be in and the unearthly peace that surrounded the trees made my decision easy. I remortgaged, borrowed £30,000 added it to my existing capital and bought the place within a couple of weeks.

The agreement with the previous owner was that he would have the benefit of the olive harvest of 2005 having been the one who tended to the land in the growing season of that year. I heard good things about the yield but didn’t concern myself with it as I bought the property for its location and scenery not for its money earning potential. I spent days in spring and early summer of 2006 in the olive grove, sometimes clearing away dead vegetation, gathering and piling rocks and other days just sitting and reading on the front porch of the house enjoying the quiet and sense of private space. In late summer, realising that this was where I would like us to live in the future, Sezgin began to take an interest in the property. We spent several bakingly hot days whitewashing the trunks of the olives to try to protect them from the depredations of unfriendly ants. It was during this time that I learnt my first unromantic lesson regarding my beautiful grove, if disturbed by trundling feet and human activity it’s first line of defence is to release clouds of mosquitoes from the soil to harass and confound the intruders. On one particular day Sezgin and I finished a bottle of Jungle Formula between the two of us.

Once Sezgin began to work on the land his extended family also began to become involved. His uncle Arif and Sez spent a whole day moving earth around the grove, flattening hummocks and digging up thorn bushes. Sezgin must have lit at least 15 fires that Sunday and the noise the two of them created seemed immense when compared to the normally tranquil time I spent there. In the brief spaces when they weren’t working the air was punctuated by motorcycles roaring up and down the field in front as the rest of the village men came to look at what they’d achieved. Most of the work that I had done at the property until then had been by hand and my girlfriend Ellis lives in the house on the plot, I associate the land with a gentle feminine energy and the men seemed to be intent on ripping it apart. I could feel the earth screaming under their assault and was only too glad when they finished shouting, cutting, digging, pushing and burning.  

As we moved into the month of October the burning question has been what to do with the olives that our trees were producing. Most of these tall trees were planted over 70 years ago when camels were bred in the area and they were allowed to grow tall then in order to stop the camels being able to reach their branches and eat their fruit. As a result there are only a few low hanging branches whose olives we can reach by hand, with a ladder or a stick. We were advised to wait until the first big storm lashed the olives to the ground and then to pick them up from there. That happened about 10 days ago and since then we have been trying to find the time to get over to our grove to gather the fallen harvest. It became apparent to my in-laws that Sezgin and I were not going to manage to pick the olives before they rotted so they decided that they would pitch in and help us as did his aunt Canser and ubiquitous uncle Arif.

I have spent the last two days engaged in the most back breaking, baby and belly crushing, thigh destroying work I have ever done. All my romantic ideas about my own olive oil have flown out of the window. Just pass me a bottle of supermarket bought extra virgin Riviera and not only will I be a happy shopper but I’ll even put aside the time to spare a sympathetic thought or two for the poor sod that had to pick the olives that made the oil. We picked 3 acres of grove in one and a half days with the women carrying out the bulk of the work. In total we gathered 7 sacks of olives which is 140 kilos. When pressed this should make 8 cans of olive oil weighing 18 kilos each for which the wholesale payment rate is approximately 100YTL. İt is a lot of work for not very much money.

Perhaps the most valuable thing to come out of the experience was not just the falling away of my olive-tinted spectacles but also the time spent with my mother-in-law. I am not top of her list of favourite people being only 8 years younger than she is, a divorcee, over educated, not acclimatised to village life and unlikely to accord her the deference she probably expected from a ‘gelin’ in the family. We hung out for hours and I have to respect not just her strength (she was engaging in this arduous labour only 10 weeks after a hysterectomy) but also her stamina, she picked all day and managed to talk all the way through! I hope that her opinion of me may have improved to as I gamely waded in and ploughed on with work I wasn’t enjoying and had little skill at. The proverbial olive branch seemed to pass back and forth between us all day while the real olive branches above our bent heads and backs danced and swayed in the gentle autumn breeze.