Olive harvest at Caltech
Nov 8th, 2007 by Jill
Last week Caltech harvested its campus olives and sent them off to be pressed into olive oil.
Olive harvesting
Trees in the lineup
More links:
- Caltech Olive Harvest Festival website
- Cook and Nifty Wench: Olive Harvest
- Tableau Vivante: EVENT: CalTech Olive Harvest Redux…phew
That’s so cool!
UC Davis started doing this a couple years ago, and they now make some really terrific olive oil. Small batches, but high quality. Of course, there you can probably get Ag School credit for it….
UCD has olive trees, too–mostly lining the bike path that borders one of our main arteries. There was a big uproar a few months ago when they trimmed them…residents were claiming they were pruned improperly…but others were arguing that with the university’s expertise in such matters, they’d been trimmed correctly. Thanks for reminding me about the olive oil. I wanted to check out the UCD stuff.
Last time I was at Tech, I remember seeing a lot of oranges rotting on the ground. Big, juicy oranges. No one would pick them up, so they would lie all around rotting. What a waste. If I remember right, it was in that narrow walk between Firestone and Dabney / Fleming Hovses.
I hope someone figured what to do with those oranges by now!
I love that Caltech has olive trees on its campus. We just finished our harvest in New Zealand. It’s exhausting but very rewarding work.
I live across the road and I did not know they had olive trees. I want some of the oil!