Olive trees are beautiful. Their thin, silvery leaves and the smooth bark on the sprawling branches make for a tree that begs for kids to climb up, and also an elegant appearance. Since the Verde Valley’s climate is similar to certain places in Italy, olive trees do well here. The trees here at Candlewood are certainly doing well here, too! 

Over the past week, we harvested over 10 pounds of olives for making oil and over 30 pounds of olives for curing and brining. This was the biggest harvest yet! But, after harvesting thousands of olives and after watching countless videos and reading dozens of articles on how to process olives into oil and for eating, we have a new found appreciation of the olive product that we cook with and eat every day. And we almost decided that it would be just as easy to harvest the olives and then fly to Italy where they have the processing method down to a literal science. A small amount of olive oil, as it turns out, comes from dozens of pounds of olives and hours of work, especially when you don’t have exactly the right equipment. The 10 pounds we harvested only produced enough oil to use for cooking one meal! Nevertheless, we enjoyed it, and we still have many pounds of olives to cure for the coming months! We are salt curing, water curing and brining olives to have and share with our guests… we invite you to come try them!