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November 07, 2008, 02:42 PM ET
At Caltech, a Festival Draws Volunteers to Harvest Olives From Campus Trees
If you’re anywhere near Pasadena today, you might want to stop by the California Institute of Technology for the Olive Harvest Festival, during which volunteers gather olives from about 130 trees scattered across the campus.
The harvest’s organizers say they are building on lessons learned since 2005, when a student named Kristen Kozak harvested some Caltech olives and attempted to cure them with salt, only to discover that they were infested with fruit flies. She and several friends gathered olives the following year and succeeded in pressing them to produce olive oil, which was declared “delicious.”
Last year brought the first large-scale harvest, which drew more than 350 volunteers but produced only about 30 gallons of oil, in part because of “close to 100 percent” fruit-fly infestation. This year the university’s grounds department has fought back, spraying the trees with an “organic, molasses-based fly repellant,” and also trapping flies in plastic bottles that attract the pests with a yeast-and-sugar mixture. The trees were recently reported to be fly-free.
If all goes well, today’s volunteers will harvest between two and four times as many olives as were gathered last year. Some of the olives will be hand-pressed on the campus so that their oil can be served this evening at a outdoor harvest dinner. It has “bread and olive oil, beef and vegetable skewers, greek salad, and baklava” on the menu, plus entertainment by the Caltech Jazz Band.
The rest of the olives will be sent to the Santa Barbara Olive Company for processing, and the oil will go on sale in the Caltech bookstore in about a month.
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