Ready for the 2026 olive harvest? The checklist for the last three weeks

In three weeks' time, in the first groves of central and southern Italy, it begins. It is not a date you pick at a desk: it is set by the cultivar, the season and the colour of the fruit. What you do decide now is the state you get there in — whether the grass under the trees is high or the ground is clean, whether the nets have been counted or «should be enough», whether the harvester starts first time or turns out to be flat on the morning of the harvest.

This is the checklist for the last three weeks. No item takes more than half a day: all of them, if put off, cost twice as much once the harvest has started.

First question: when do you really start

There is one practical rule, and it is not the calendar: you harvest when most of the fruit has turned, when the colour shifts from green to purple. The earlier you pick, the less oil you take home but the more character it has: bitterness, pungency and polyphenols — which are also what keeps the oil good over time — are at their highest early in the colour change and fall as the fruit ripens.

The balance point changes from variety to variety: a Leccino ripens early and all at once, a Coratina comes late and detaches with effort, a Nocellara del Belice destined for the table is picked while still green. If you want to know where yours sits, we wrote it variety by variety in the guide to Italian olive cultivars from north to south.

The check to make now: walk the rows with a bucket, pick a dozen olives from different trees and see how many have turned. Below 30% it is early. Between 40 and 70% is where almost all Italian olive growing works. Above 80% you get more oil but you are already losing quality, and the first fruits start dropping by themselves.

The grove: three weeks out

The least visible job is the one that saves the most hours: mow under the canopy and leave the ground short. With high grass the nets do not lie flat, the olives disappear into the green and every pass becomes a treasure hunt. On a slope, short grass also keeps the net in place.

• Access and ground: where does the vehicle that takes the crates away go through? A rut opened by September rain takes an hour to fill now, and cannot be filled at all in ten minutes with a loaded trailer.
• Low branches and suckers: two clean-up cuts free the path for the nets. This is light work, not real pruning — pruning comes after the harvest, from December.
• Trees that will not hold: if a limb is split, better to know now than with four people underneath.

Nets: count them, do not estimate

The net is the most underrated tool of the harvest. It needs to cover the whole canopy projection plus a metre: olives being shaken do not fall straight down, they bounce. A short net means hand-picking whatever lands outside, and that is the slowest work there is.

Do it now, not the day before: spread a net on the ground and look at it properly. Tears take five minutes to sew with a net needle and thread; found in the field they become olives falling through. Count the real metres — not from memory — and compare them with the number of trees you plan to do in a day.

The tool: the dry run

A harvester that worked a season and then sat in a shed for eleven months does not get switched on the morning of the harvest: it gets switched on two weeks earlier, in the yard, calmly. The check takes twenty minutes.

1. Battery fully charged. If you work off the car battery and the inverter, check that too: a battery that struggled to start the tractor in winter will not last eight hours of harvesting.
2. The whole cable. Unroll all of it and run it through your fingers: abrasions are found by touch before they are seen. Joints must be dry and tight.
3. The carbon tines. A cracked one snaps on the first thick branch and leaves you with a lame comb. Keeping a couple of spares in the box costs little and is worth a day.
4. Fasteners and pole. Run the telescopic pole through its full travel, check the lock and tighten the screws on the head: vibration always loosens them.
5. A minute running empty, listening. A new noise now is a phone call to service; the same noise in three weeks is a lost day.

Our Falco EVO 42 and the EVO 42 ULTRA version also have a three-speed selector: it is worth deciding now, not up the ladder, which setting you will use. Low on young trees and table olives, medium for everyday harvesting, high on varieties that detach with effort — Coratina, Taggiasca, Ravece.

People: who does what

A crew that organises itself on site loses the first hour. There are three roles and it pays to assign them in advance: who lays and moves the nets, who shakes, who gathers and fills. The third is the bottleneck: if the shaker goes faster than the gatherer, the olives sit on the ground and take up moisture.

On safety there is not much to discuss and it costs nothing: gloves, goggles when working overhead, closed shoes, and never a ladder on soft ground without securing it. If you work with the cable and inverter, keep the cable run out of the way of people.

From the grove to the mill

This is where you lose the quality earned over a whole year. Two rules:

• Perforated crates, never sacks. In a sack olives heat up and ferment within hours, and the fusty defect in the oil never comes out.
• Milling within 12-24 hours. Book the mill now: in peak season the slots run out, and a three-day wait undoes a harvest done well.

If the mill is far away, it is better to plan shorter harvest days with immediate delivery than to stockpile three days of olives for a single trip.

Three mistakes that come back every year

1. Waiting for «the good week». It does not come: the fruit does not ripen all at once. You start when most of it has turned and accept leaving something behind.
2. Harvesting with the tree wet. Damp olives pack together, heat up and cover the nets in soil. Better to start two hours later, once the sun has dried things off.
3. Keeping the wrong setting all day. Insisting gently on a stubborn variety tires the operator and leaves half the crop on the tree; going hard on young trees takes away leaves and the year's new shoots, which are next season's crop.

In short

The olive harvest is not won on harvest day. It is won now: clean ground, nets counted and whole, tool tested empty, crew with roles assigned and mill booked. Five things, none of them hard. Whoever does them walks into the season thinking only about picking; whoever does not spends the first three days chasing them, and those are exactly the days when the fruit is at its best.

If you have doubts about the tool — which setting to use on your cultivar, whether the cable or the backpack suits you better, which spares to keep in the box — call us before you start, not during: +39 0865 860247, a technician answers.