MALETS

2026 Second olive pressing event – 9th June

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3–4 minutes

Our second communal olive picking and processing event is coming up soon.

Collection point

  • At the Duke Street location of weekly MALETS market. The address is 4 Duke Street (the park opposite the Castle Motel, where the U3A rotunda is).
  • Please be there by 1 pm on Tuesday 9th June
  • If you are bringing a large quantity of olives (50 kg or more), we would appreciate an email in advance so that we can plan.

Tips for olive picking

  • We can take any quantity of olives, from a few kilograms up to hundreds of kilograms.
  • Olives should be picked as late as possible so they are fresh when we get them. We recommend picking no earlier than Saturday 6th.
  • Do not include large kalamata olives. They don’t have a high olive content and have large stones which can damage the press. Large kalamatas are more suited to pickling than oil production.
  • Do not include damaged olives, including those with bird pecks, frost damage, those that have been stood on and those that are overripe and mushy. Damaged olives can taint the oil.
  • Please remove all leaves, as the presence of leaves will make the oil bitter. We particularly don’t want small branches which have both leaves and olives.
  • Both black and green olives are fine. But do not include too many hard, green unripe olives, as they don’t contain much oil. To test if your olives are ripe enough, you can press them with a finger nail. If they indent easily, and you can squeeze out an oily liquid, then they are ripe enough. If they are very hard and you can’t compress them easily, then leave them on the tree.

How to store your olives

Put them in olive crates if you have them (up to 20 kg per crate). If you don’t have crates, then we prefer small cardboard boxes with no more than 10 kg per box, to make handling easier. Please do not use very large boxes which are heavy to handle, damaged boxes or flimsy boxes. The ideal boxes are the ones that hold six bottles of wine – they are easy to handle and can be closed with cardboard flaps on top of the box, making them easy to stack. If you can’t get wine boxes then choose boxes of similar size, preferably with cardboard flaps.

Please write your name on your boxes and crates. If you are a MALETS member please include your member number. If you are not a MALETS member, we will need your full name, phone number and email address.

What we will do

  • Weigh all olives using the same set of scales, for fairness and consistency. You don’t need to weigh your own.
  • Deliver the olives to the press.
  • Collect the oil from the press.
  • Calculate how to share the oil between all contributors. Your share of the oil will be in proportion to the amount of olives you contribute. The figures vary from year to year due to seasonal conditions and the variety of olives in the mix, but as a rough guide, if you contribute 10 kg of olives you can expect about 1.5 litres of oil.
  • Calculate your share of the costs. The cost in 2025 was approximately $6.70 per kilo of oil. MALETS members will be charged costs in pods.
  • Return your share of oil to you. We use clean wine bottles for smaller quantities of oil. If you have a large quantity of olives, we would appreciate it if you could provide your own container (e.g. a food grade plastic drum) for your oil.

Need more information?

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