wrote on Nov 14^th, 2008 at 9:38pm:

I know very little about olives/oil, but the little bit I do know: One way of starting to identify the different trees is one type has a straight trunk, the other has a twisted trunk - the ones with twisted trunks started to go black earlier than the straight trunk type - at least this year. Talking to the man in the mill, the oil is of lower acidity and higher quality if you have green olives than if they are black - black ones have more water in them, so if you're after your own oil take them when they're green. I often wondered what the ratio was in terms of Kg of olives to litres of oil - it varies greatly and even the mill people don't know until it's done - for example, we took in 140Kg of olives and the chap at the mill said we should expect 20 - 25 litres of oil from them - we actually got 46 which was a suprise to both him and us - and the acidity was 0.4% which is extremely good! As to identifying trees, good luck!  There are big olives, small olives and medium sized ones :) Nigel

Hi Nigel, May I ask which Oil mill you took your olives into. I have only ever sold all my olives. So what is the process for the oil?Do you have to provide the bottles? What does the oil mill charge you for producing the oil or do they take half the oil?Please, this is a genuine enquiry and not a wind up.