This year’s olives…… hardly worth it. Larger than last year’s crop, but probably just as few.
I think that my tree is refusing to produce many olives because it is objecting to being in a pot. It gets root bound and every year we pull it out of the pot and trim the roots – this probably traumatizes it.
It has given me many years of pleasure and I have certainly experimented with processes for curing the olives and dressing them.
![FullSizeRender[1]](https://i0.wp.com/www.allthingssicilianandmore.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/FullSizeRender1-800x673.jpg?resize=660%2C555)
Once pickled, my olives do not keep their colour – I pick them when they are a green- violet colour but the pickling process turns them into a uniform light brown colour.
I was horrified when I read this article in The Age (Melbourne news paper):
Olives painted with copper sulphate top largest-ever Interpol-Europol list of fake food
Italian olives painted with copper sulphate solution, Sudanese sugar tainted with fertiliser, and hundreds of thousands of litres of bogus alcoholic drinks top Interpol’s annual tally of toxic and counterfeit food seized by police agencies across the world. The haul of bogus diet supplements, adulterated honey and ……….etc.
I have often been asked about the colour of Sicilian Olives (those bright green ones as in photo above) and I really do not know how they are pickled and how the bright green colour eventuates.
There are many posts written about pickling olives and recipes using olives on my blog…. key in OLIVES in the search button. I have just tried this and there are 72 posts about olives! Here is one of them:
The olive trees in Agrigento are among the oldest in Sicily. This photo was taken in the Valley of the Temples.
Oh, to be in Agrigento now!