During the summer, we keep the gove neat and tidy. We remove suckers from beneath the trees, and any inward growth from the trees themselves, ensuring that the olives get maximum benefit from the nutrients in our soil. The olive fruit fly is our nemesis, but instead of spraying pesticides, we hang plastic bottles from the branches, baited with a "delicious" mixture of wine vinegar, ammonia and anchovies to entice the little blighters into our traps, instead of our olives.

Harvest time is a couple of weeks in early October, (we aim to finish before the clocks go back) in order to maximise flavour and the health giving properties of the oil. We only use olives from our own trees, which are a mixture of classic Italian varieties such as Frantoio, Pendolino, Leccino, and the Sabine classics, peppery Carboncello, and the beautiful Raja.

Olives, like all fruit, bruise easily, and start to spoil as soon as they are off the tree. So we harvest using little rakes, allowing the fruit to drop onto nets which we have spread under the trees. Once a tree is stripped, we hand sort the olives, removing any "sub-optimal" ones, as well as sticks, leaves, and anything else that has fallen onto the net. Finally, we scoop the best olives up into small baskets, fill the car with our day's work, and drive our precious cargo five minutes to our local olive mill. We always mill our olives within a day of harvesting.