Harvesting olives is the penultimate step in producing olive oil or edible olives, and it should be done correctly. Various tools and products will help you pick olives quickly and adequately, and one of them are olive harvesting net catchers. In today’s article, I decided to thoroughly describe why you should use them when harvesting olive trees.
Olive harvesting nets are one of the most essential tools you should use when picking olives. By installing harvesting nets under the trees, all the fruit you harvest will fall to them, instead of falling to the dirty ground full of leaves, poops, feces, etc. That way, collecting olives from the ground (net) is extremely quick. You just need to pluck olives from the net into the containers.
I already said this in another article, but I’ll repeat myself. I still know many olive growers that don’t use harvesting nets, and honestly, I can’t understand that. That’s one of the biggest reasons why I’m writing this article. I want to show all the benefits of olive harvesting nets so that more people start utilizing them.
What’s The Purpose of Olive Harvesting Nets
The purpose of olive harvesting nets is to create a layer above the ground so all the olive fruits fall into the nets instead of falling to the ground. Harvesting nets sort of catch all the olives that you dislodged from the tree.
The second purpose of olive harvesting nets is collecting olives from the floor. You won’t have to pick up all the olives from the ground when you have nets installed. You’ll only have to pluck olives from the net right into the containers or bags, and the olives are ready for transport.
At first, they may not seem necessary, but when you dive deeper into the reasons, you’ll see that they’re significant. So, make sure to read the rest of the article.
Why Do You Need Harvesting Nets
I already said the most important things you should know, but I want to elaborate them even more.
Reasons why you should use harvesting nets when picking olives:
- Olives won’t fall to the ground and pick a lot of dirt, poops, etc.
- It’s easier to collect olives from the net than from the ground
- You’ll save plenty of time by having all the olives inside the net
- The whole harvesting process becomes more profitable
- If your olive farm is on a slope, harvesting nets are even more needed since all the olives will stay in one place
It takes some time to properly install harvesting nets under the trees, but once you do it, they’re all set, and they’ll collect all the olives that fall from the trees.
What If You Don’t Use Them When Picking Olives
Without using harvesting nets when picking olives, you’ll have a much tougher job to do. Olives will fall to the ground, and when it’s time for picking them and storing them in containers or bags, you’ll have to manually pick every single olive from the ground, which means a lot of kneeling and bending down, which is again highly physically demanding.
Depending on the climate you grow your olive trees in, the ground could be muddy, full of rocks, grassy, etc. All of those situations make it harder to pick olives from the ground, especially if the soil is muddy.
Olive fruits aren’t large, and it’ll be tough to collect all of them without using harvesting nets, and it’ll take a lot of time. When I was a kid, we would collect plums for the brandy. Grandma would wait for plums to fall from the tree naturally, but she didn’t install harvesting nets under the tree. Instead, olives fell directly to the muddy ground. I hated that job a lot! It’s boring, physically demanding, and extremely slow. The same thing is with olives, if not even worse since they’re smaller than plums.
Are All Harvesting Nets Suitable For Olive Picking?
When I say olive harvesting nets, it doesn’t actually mean that those are some specific nets for harvesting olives only. Harvesting nets are mostly multipurpose harvesting nets that can gather many different fruits.
So, I would say that 99% of harvesting nets will be suitable for olive picking. You only need to make sure they’re large enough to cover the area under the tree. Even if it’s not, you can tie more nets into one, so they become big enough.
There are also some new products called spider webs. Those are harvesting nets mounted to a device that makes it extremely quick and easy to mount and move from tree to tree. They’re fantastic, but with them, you’re limited with size, you can’t tie more of them into one net, and that’s why I like standard harvesting nets more.
Conclusion
It would be a shame not to use olive harvesting net catchers, mainly because they’re available at an affordable price in almost every agricultural market.
Harvesting nets have so many advantages when picking olives, and I don’t see a single disadvantage. That’s just amazing. If you didn’t use them before, I hope that after reading this article, you’ll start using them regularly when picking olives or some other fruits.
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