Notes from our olive grove in Kamisiana, Western Crete
People imagine owning an olive grove as a lifestyle. Golden sunlight, slow afternoons, a straw hat, and the occasional poetic moment of shaking a branch while olives gracefully fall into a basket.
In reality, olive farming is less poetry and more negotiation. Mostly with trees. Sometimes with insects. Frequently with gravity.
Back in 2022, Jasmin and Michel bought a small piece of land in Kamisiana, near Kolimvari in western Crete — one of those regions where olives are not just agriculture but heritage. The plan was modest: maybe one day we would build a house there. Something simple. A future place. Nothing dramatic.
The property came with 30 elderly residents, each roughly between 60 and 100 years old, each deeply skeptical of our intentions – Koroneiki olive trees.
In Greece they call this variety the queen of olives. Hardy, drought-resistant, adapted to heat and stone and wind. We assumed that meant easy. What it actually meant was: they had survived everything so far and were not particularly impressed by some Swiss people with a regenerative farming idea in their mind.
We (or better said Michel) decided early that we would farm without chemicals, without irrigation and without plowing. The grove had been managed conventionally before — tidy soil, no weeds, Summer water, quick nutrients. Essentially a spa resort for trees.
We replaced it with reality.
The trees responded the way anyone does when moved from a hotel buffet to a survival course: productivity declined sharply.
Our first harvest in 2022 was the educational one. We harvested in late November, proudly organic, confident in nature’s balance. Nature responded by introducing us to Dakos, the olive fruit fly, who had been waiting all year for exactly this kind of optimism.
The olives were… inhabited and rotting around the trees.
This is how you learn timing matters more than philosophy. In Crete, you harvest early or you share. We had shared generously – about 2/3 of our entire harvest.
The following years we did better but the harvest still very modest. Not because the trees were failing — because they were rebuilding. When you stop irrigation and plowing, roots must grow deeper. When you allow vegetation, trees must compete. When soil wakes up biologically, energy goes underground first and only later into fruit.
We mulched with shredded pruning, built small swales so winter rains would infiltrate instead of escaping downhill, removed only the most aggressive thorny weeds and encouraged plants that attract predators of the olive fly like parasitic wasps. We mowed by hand. Harvested by hand. Tried to damage as little as possible.
And slowly the grove stopped looking tidy and started looking alive.
Butterflies multiplied — not slightly but dramatically. Birds nested in the hedges. Hedgehogs moved into deadwood piles we had left intentionally. One night even badgers inspected our soil like auditors reviewing accounts.
Ecologically everything improved. Economically, for a while, not so much.
Then came 2025 — our sabbatical year, the year we also began building our house on the land – as you could read a lot about. Ironically, construction required pruning and even replanting nine of the thirty trees back in October 2024. We expected a poor harvest again.
Instead, the grove decided we had finally proven commitment.
We harvested our best crop so far.
Harvesting olives by hand is a strangely intimate process. You don’t collect fruit, you spend time with each tree. Some cooperate, some argue. Some release olives easily, others cling to them as if storing emotional memories in each one.
For five days Michel, sometimes with the support of local friends, moved between trees with small rakes and long ones, sometimes climbing into branches because the only way to convince a Koroneiki olive to let go is to meet it halfway. Large nets caught the falling fruit and slowly filled. Jute bags reached weights that made every meter feel philosophical.
Certain trees took more than an hour each. Around tree number eighteen you stop asking how many remain and start negotiating with your future self – but your mind stays calm while your muscles ache.
Each evening we drove the olives ten minutes to the cooperative mill in nearby Sirili. The process is wonderfully straightforward: leaves removed, olives washed, crushed into paste, gently mixed below 27°C, then spun until gold-green oil separates from water. The machine hums, the scent fills the air, and suddenly months of waiting become liquid.
This year the result was 145 liters of extra virgin olive oil, single-origin Koroneiki, acidity between 0.4 and 0.5 percent — a level that signals careful harvest timing and healthy fruit.
After transport to Switzerland, the oil now rests in the cellar, clarifying naturally as sediments settle. Its flavor is intensely green and fruity, fresh-cut grass at first, then bitterness and a peppery finish — the signature of early harvest and high polyphenols. The kind of oil that makes you understand why in Crete bread is often just a delivery system.
But the most satisfying moment did not happen at the mill.
It happened when local neighbors — people whose families have farmed olives for generations — asked how we manage to produce olives like this without irrigation or plowing.
That question meant the grove had crossed an invisible line. We were no longer just experimenting. The system was working.
Our project was never about producing large quantities. It was about learning whether a small grove can transition from input-dependent farming to resilience — slowly, imperfectly, but measurably.
For years the grove gave us mostly lessons. This year it finally gave us oil again.
We still live in Switzerland while the house in Crete approaches completion, and sometimes the sabbatical already feels distant. But each container we open brings back the sound of nets rustling under branches, dogs supervising with great seriousness, and the quiet moment when oil first appears from the press.
If you follow our story from afar, you are part of the grove’s circle — proof that agriculture can be shared even across distance.
And if the oil tastes a little vivid, a little alive, that might simply be what patience tastes like.
— Michel, Jasmin, Jane, 4 dogs and 30 slowly approving trees
No responses yet