Pressing together

Over an autumn weekend in 2021 700 people harvested 6.6 tonnes of olives from backyards, front yards, street trees and parks across Melbourne 

Only three years earlier the 200 kilogram harvest for 3000 Acres’ first Olives to Oil Harvest Festival fitted comfortably into a couple of shopping trolleys.

By 2021, even with COVID at its height the growing enthusiasm for Olives to Oil couldn’t be dampened; organiser Merrin Layden hurriedly hired a crane truck, a dozen commercial harvest bins and many extra hands to cope with the overwhelming olive influx.

The olives were trucked up to Sandra Brajevic’s Barfold Olive farm in Kyneton, where the most eclectic olive harvest Sandra’s Rapanelli processing machine would ever see was pressed, bottled and returned to the urban olive pickers a fortnight later.

Somehow a bottle of the oil found its way to the Royal Adelaide Show where it won a Silver Medal.

The judges’ tasting comments cited, “fresh tropical fruits, tomato, apple and grass aromas and a touch of black pepper flavour on a lingering finish”.

That so many people could come together across a large city to achieve something so wonderful seems improbable, though if we look a little deeper into our hunter-gathering and early farming DNA perhaps we’re wired this way. 

Wired around seasonal gatherings and comings together in places to process surplus on shared grinding stones, mills, smoking houses, ovens, vats, kilns and presses.

These harvests brought us together, they were the times to catch-up, to learn, to trade, to cement friendships, find partners and give thanks to the Earth that provided for us.

If all that rings a bell deep inside you, then it’s time to get your picking crew together and bring your olives, your neighbour’s or your neighbourhood’s olives in for pressing.

And if you have an olive tree but can’t pick it contact Merrin at olivestooil@ceres.org.au and she’ll do her best to find someone who would love to pick them.

This year Olives to Oil runs over three weekends in three different parts of Melbourne, in partnership with Moreland, Yarra, Darebin, and the Corner Store Network.

You can drop your olives off on either;

·       Sunday 15th May at the Links Community Garden, Lalor
·       Sunday 29th May at CERES Brunswick East and the CERES Fair Food Warehouse in Preston
·        Saturday and Sunday 18th and 19th June  The Corner Store Network, Oakleigh

Sandra at Barfold Olives will have your extra virgin oil ready to go a couple of weeks later.

All the Olives to Oil details are here and if you’d like to try 2021’s award winning pressing we’ve managed to get hold of 40 very hard to find bottles here.

Oh, and one more thing – if you’re a CERES Fair Food customer you can get your oil delivered with your Fair Food order – look out for an Olives to Oil email with a coupon code.

Fair Wood – bringing it all home

CERES Fair Wood carpenter, Huw Vaughan, built this wonderfully warm and open fence in Brunswick (Wurundjeri Country).

This pic was taken between downpours last week – you might be able to spot the bee taking respite amongst the Hyssop.

This fence is everything that CERES Fair Wood is about – from the use of materials and the details of the finish to the combination of salvaged Cypress Macrocarpa and recycled Turpentine. The landscaping from the owners is lovely too!

Huw and his talented crew are building beautiful, high feature fences, decks, extensions and studios using CERES Fair Wood’s sustainable locally sourced timbers – if you’d like to know more you can find them here.

Have a great week

Chris