This is happening now at our place: curing olives without lye

The ultimate forage may be when you're offered something for free without having to go out and search for it! Through such a transaction, we came to possess 20 olive trees in 4 varieties, specifically developed for oil production. 

You can get a sense of how small the trees are, even though they're several years old, from this photo.
The olive trees are in the foreground.

A nurseryman friend offered us as many olive trees as our pickup could hold because they were going to be destroyed before the coming season. Several years down the road now, our little corner of California has a row of about 15-18 surviving olive trees, in 4 varieties for olive-oil production. Two of them are arbequina and manzanilla; the names of the others are lost in the sands of time (aka, I don't want to search for them anymore).

These trees have such a small, tidy growth habit - for example, no huge, gnarled branches, such as you see in the old Mission olive trees - that they can be planted 500 to an acre! Although we don't haul our olives to be pressed at a commercial facility and haven't bought a press ourselves, we would be able to put away several bottles of oil each year from that row of trees. Instead, we experiment with curing them for eating. 

NOTE: Before you preserve food at home, follow all safety instructions such as using clean equipment, etc. Some foods, including olives, can develop botulism. Blech.

This year, we've started a couple of batches using different curing methods. The first, which we set in motion last week, is brining them in salt and water - no lye needed! After picking, washing, and sorting the olives (throwing any damaged or shriveled ones into the compost bowl), I poured them into a 1/2-gallon canning jar, covered them with a brine made of filtered water and pickling salt (for ratios, follow the directions on the pickling salt package). Then I set the cap loosely on the jar, labeled it with the date and type of brining process, and set it in a dim room. One week from the date I picked and pickled them, I'll change the brining solution, tighten the caps, and store them for a couple of months. Full directions for this method can be found here.

These ripe, washed olives look like Concord grapes. You'd know the difference immediately if you bit into one.

The silver maple from which the olives are hanging

The other batch is being cured using a method that worked for us in the past: dry curing with salt. This method involves picking, washing, and sorting just as above; then, you mix the olives with a pound of pickling salt for every 2 pounds of olives. You hang this mixture in a bag (I used an old pillowcase) OUTSIDE (drip, drip, drip) for 4 or 5 weeks and then perform another step or so before storing them for eating.

With mesh bag on the outside for added strength

Specific directions can be found here. 

Depending on the variety of olives I actually picked last week, some of the olives may turn out mushier than we'd like, but that's OK. What we don't eat goes to the chicken yard, where the fowl either eat it or help turn it to compost.

Because our olive trees produce small olives compared with, say, the canned black olives most widely available in grocery stores, the salt-cured olives will be smaller than some people want to mess with - and both the brined and salt-cured olives will still have their pits. Again, that's OK! This is a fun experiment in seeing how much of the produce we grow will actually get eaten or otherwise used.

Have you cured olives at home? Let me know how you did it and how successful you think it was!