The magnificent olive harvest

The family went to help Ahmed with his olive harvest. Ahmed has become a great friend and has helped us enormously with organising the riad work and helping us to find materials.

I loved the olive harvest there was a real sense of community and it reminded me of something we so often forget. Just helping each other out. You can get so caught up in the daily grind of life and getting things done. I had a real moment when i stood up and looking around at the beautiful ancient olive trees, I thought this is the lifestyle change i was after and this is the sort of integration with the Moroccan country folk that is so important. It's so easy to swan in here buy a lovely villa eat at lovely restaurants and actually have little to do with the Moroccan culture and way of life.

I recommend olive harvest to everyone who needs to re-generate their energy, feel a sense of harmony and occomplishment and to bond once more with the earth. Enough of the hippy lecture! We also collected the olives off our few old olive trees in the garden. They have gone to be pressed with Ahmeds as they wont press small collections of olives. We have 15 litres of oil from our trees !! organic virgin olive oil at that! another reason to stay at the riad so that you can eat it and cover your body in it after a hammam.

The olive tree basher. Someone hits the branches of the tree as all the olives shoot down onto the ground. They actually quite hurt as they hit you. My daughter spent the whole time shouting Oww!

The younger generation carrying the heavy plastic boxes full of olives. There was a big smile on their faces when they saw my 4 wheel drive, which we loaded up. Saved them carrying them all.