This is What You Have to Do to Make your Own Olive Oil
Living in community can be hard work!
Especially when your community has been creating a whole new society for over 40 years!
At Damanhur, we try to produce as much as we can internally. When you come to Damanhur, you see agriculture, animal husbandry, clothing, ceramics, and a while array of Damanhurian-produced goods and services. This ensures that we eat, wear, use, the highest quality products we can made with positive intention and that special magical touch! For some, this is a primary business, and for others, it is devotional work offered for the growth of the community.
Photo by Damanhur Spiritual EcoCommunity (CC BY-ND 2.0)
For example, while most nucleos—the community houses of 8 to 25 people plus land in which we live—have some type of agriculture or livestock, we also have a dedicated farm nucleo called, Porta della terra. There you can find large numbers of greenhouses, cattle, chickens, donkeys, and a farm-to-table restaurant. In my nucleo, Cornucopia, we have pigs, rabbits, chickens, multiple greenhouses of vegetables, a small fruit orchard, and various other wild fruit across the 2 hectars of land. It takes lots of work, but luckily there is Rospo and Pooka to look over the bulk of it, plus the occassional work exchange.
For the last six months, I have been splitting my time between Damanhur and Florence, where I am part of the Damanhur Firenze center. We don't currently have a nucleo in Tuscany, but just because people live in their own homes (technically, I share a house with another Damanhurian), doesn't mean the workload is any less. If anything, it is more, because you don't have the benefits of sharing the housework with others!
WINE and OLIVE OIL
Tuscany being the amazing and fertile region that it is, Damanhur has two national projects there: wine and olive oil. Some Damanhurians have their own vineyards, producing a number of different organic and biodynamic Tuscan wines—Fattoria Castellina and Fratelli Falzari. And in addition to that, we have a national orchard for the production of a wine called, IPJAL. Being a national project, it means that all of us contribute to the cultivation and maintenance of the vineyard. I hope to get down there soon to help out in the process.
Where I have instead had the immense pleasure of helping with is the olive grove!
We have over a thousand trees in Rimaggio!! I didn't realize how many that was until I spent the first day under the hot Tuscan sun pruning trees and fixing nets. The olives are just starting to come in, so there is lots of maintenance to do in order to ensure a good harvest. The better the harvest, the more olive oil we can produce for the community and friends that have become addicted to the golden goodness of Damanhurian produced high quality Tuscan olive oil!
I can't say the work is glamorous! The last time I was there, I spent most of my time sewing shut tiny holes in the nets we use to capture the falling olives. Do you know how small of a hole an olive can get through? Really small! So every year, a big group of people spend hours in the sun looking for tiny little holes in these giant nets. When you find one, you use a big needle and fishing wire to sew it up tight. Every hole represents a possible escape path for our precious olives. And trust me, you don't want to miss out on even a single one!
That being said, all devotional work at Damanhur is fun when it is done with others. Working together is the best way to get to know someone. We often say that meditation at Damanhur is done "with your hands". We rarely sit silently, instead we are an active community that firmly believes that every time you do something with intention and conscious awareness, you divinitize matter. And what better way to reawaken the divine within and without than with others?!
Soon it will be harvest season, and I will be back there to gather up the bounty. Then off it goes to be turned into liquid gold. For Italians, there are always at least three types of olive oils in the house: the one you cook with, the one you use day-to-day, and that special bottle you use raw when you really want to savor the taste. While we make oil for the first and second options, it is always our hope to produce a fair amount of the latter. So while the work is hard and sweaty and exhausting, I happily do it for the multiple benefits it produces. Not only do I get to enjoy olive oil produced by my own hands, it is doubly blessed by the bonds we created while producing it.
Wow this is amazing. We have a few olives planted at home but obviouslt not enough for oil...
You would be amazed at what it takes. I knew someone that had an orchard where you could adopt a tree. As part of your adoption, each year you would receive about 5 liters of oil, or something similar, from each tree. It was a great way to ensure the trees were taken care of and get fresh oil.
I love that idea. I'd love to start a community orchard based on that premise!
Do it!!!!