A Day of Work

So, here's how a day of work goes on the farm. We wake up at 6:30 and have some breakfast/coffee. But I've only got one picture of the table, strangely enough, so we'll have to reuse it from the last post. Work begins at 7.

Riding the pickup truck down from the hill for work.

This has only actually happened once or twice, but I took a bunch of pictures because it was fun.

 Usually we just walk to work--it's not far away.

Most of the time, the work is clearing the brush around the olive trees.

This is necessary because, in addition to diverting nutrients from the trees, the bushes get in the way of harvesting the olives. 

Not our farm--yet.

To harvest the olives, you spread nets on the ground all around and then hit the tree with a stick. Or if you're technological and posh (like I think we are), you hit it with a machine. Either way, all the olives fall out.

To facilitate this process, we wield snazzy choppers like the ones pictured here.

There's a lot of brush to go through.

But we take breaks every hour or so, more often if the supervisor (Mikalis) is there.  He has a strange objection to hard work...

Every now and then, we burn some brush.

It's important to be careful with the fire, though, and keep it low. It never rains around here, so all the grass is tinder-dry. Add to that all the fuel we have to pile at the perimeter in the burning queue, and you've got a recipe for disaster. Someone on Chios recently left a fire before it was fully extinguished, and it flared up again, catching the dry, oily olive trees that cover the hills. Chios was burning for five days.

SO, Mikalis watches the fire, all the time.

When we end work at 11, olive trees make great racks for holding our tools overnight.