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<pre>Recently I was looking through an old gardening book my grandmother regarded as
her 'gardening bible' - 'Brunnings Australian Gardner' 38th edition, printed
in 1958.
In the small section on olives it said this, in part.
"To
extract the oil, gather the fruit as soon as ripe, and spread out on trays for a
few days to allow a quantity of water in the fruit to evaporate, then crush and
put into coarse bags to allow the oil to run out."

Can this be true? [ it's a bit late in the season for me to try] or did the
author find that our post-war Mediterranean immigrants were going to such
lengths to make some precious olive oil rather than go to the chemist to buy
rancid oil that my mother would have been buying to clean ears?

Alan Watt, Tanja Olives


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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