2024 Olive Harvest at Le Farmhouse

Highlights from our 2nd Annual Harvest Party

While we love Summer in Provence, we absolutely cherish Autumn in Provence. It is a quieter time of year, and the Luberon Valley is busy with Fall harvests: grapes and olives, in particular. At Le Farmhouse, we have over 230 olive trees on our 20 acres -- and it is not an insignificant amount of work throughout the year. In February and March, we prune. We are told that an annual prune of the olive tree can easily require 15-25% of the tree being pruned. We have installed drip irrigation for those hot and dry weeks when the Provençal sun beats down and the olive trees are particularly thirsty. But most of all, our attention turns to the olive trees in November - when it is time to harvest!

Our first couple of years on the property, we tried to do this ourselves. After all, it's a romantic idea of a couple buying and olive farm and figuring out for themselves how to care for and harvest their trees each year. What we have learned over the past few years, however, is that olive harvesting can be an incredibly rewarding, communal affair. And so last year we threw down the gauntlet and invited about 25 friends and their kids to come over and help for the day. It was a blast, and so a tradition was formed.

Our 2024 Olive Harvest Party was a huge success!

We had over 45 friends and family helping - from the ages of 2 to 88 years! We started around 9:30am with a welcome coffee & tea and some croissants and pains au chocolat to give us the energy we needed to work throughout the day. We worked straight through to lunchtime, and managed to harvest almost 80 trees in 3 hours!

We stopped for a lovely catered lunch by our friends at Le Saint Hubert - a restaurant in nearby Saint-Saturnin-Lès-Apt - and then continued working well into the afternoon.

A bountiful harvest

During the harvest, and during this time of year, it is quite common for friends to ask about the quality of the harvest. How many kilos this year? What type of yield are your olives getting this year? Is is a good year?

In all honesty, we have never harvested 100% of our trees before because we have always run out of time and energy. This year, we hope to harvest every singled tree and see what our baseline (2024) is for a full harvest, so we can definitively compare years. But in our hearts, we know that every year is a good year. It was an amazing harvest, measured not just in the kilos of olives picked - a whopping 640kg (>1400 lbs) - number of trees cleared (easily over 120!). Nor just in the amount of olive oil produced - over 86 liters (22 gallons).

But most of all - it was a successful harvest in the quality time with local friends who came out to support us and share in this privilege of harvesting our own olives. And even more special this year was sharing the harvest with Dave's dad (88 years old!) and sister from Iowa.

So if you ask - yes, it was a beautiful and bountiful and heartwarming harvest! Oh, and we are still not finished yet!