How can you tell which is which?  I know there are 13 different species of olive but what authority do you use to decide which is which?   Have just delivered 400 kgs of little black soft thingies which I suppose are better than the thousands of bright green hard thingies but, of couse, are far more plentiful.   Shall wait for the green 'uns to turn red/black before harvesting them.

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

they are the 'on the buses' olives

Eric,that's as maybe... but does one press them or squeeze them ??

suck it and see.   whay else?

Ok, personal experience....
We were planning to go to Moli D'Oli in Campredo.  I asked what they charge and they said there is no minimum or maximum weight and the price is 50 euros.
We had, we thought, around 110Kg and when we got there there was a queue (we hadn't booked a time) and we had other things to do.

Some friends use the mill at Camarles so, as we were passing, we stopped by and they weren't busy.  They muttered a bit about our low weight, claiming it is a 300Kg minimum, but said they would press them for us.  We had to give an NIE number and address and, in typical Spanish beurocratic style, went from one place to the other at least 2 or 3 times.

We ended up paying just under 19 euros - Camarles charge by weight.

You need to supply your own bottles and get all of your own oil.  Take more bottles than you expect to fill as you might fet a surprise!  We got around 33cl per Kg of olives.

Good luck,

Nigel