Olives go to press

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As you heard in Friday's post, we were off harvesting olives last week at Kibbutz Gezer.
Here is me, Susan, Dani, Maybelline,  and Mikki.

Susan from Michigan, who came up with the idea to spend a week of her vacation in Israel working through WWOOF, invited me to join the olive harvest.  We had been roommates at the Hebrew-learning ulpan in Kibbutz Hazorea in 1968.  We had a lot to talk over after all these years.
Dani, a former American, divides his workday between being in charge of the olive plantation and working as a lawyer in Jerusalem.
Maybelline and her friend, Steven, were traveling the world.  In their native Singapore they had never seen a wheelbarrow before! They said the country was too small and urban to have room for agriculture but that maybe their parents or grandparents had still seen some farms.

Mikki the Israeli college student lifted the crates of our day's harvest into the trailer.
Here he is, multitasking.

And off we drove to the olive press.

We drove through the flat expanses of the Shefelah, the lowlands of central Israel, under a big sky.
(Rain came that evening, exactly as I boarded my bus back to the Negev.)
Enlarge the photo 2x and you will find recently-baled bales of hay  cotton  with bright orange-colored covers.

A smiling forklift driver off-loaded our olives and drove them toward the press.
In the next post you will see how solid olive fruit is turned into golden oil.
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To learn more you can take a look at Gezer Olives website.
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(Linking to OurWorld Tuesday.)