You will have read the short version in our August note. Here is the fuller picture, with photographs from the groves below.

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Nothing moves

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August in Cyprus is not a season so much as a pause. The heat arrives early and settles, and by mid morning the groves have gone completely silent. Even the cicadas, which spend most of the summer making a noise you stop hearing after a week, fall quiet through the middle of the day. Nothing walks. Nothing flies. The light goes flat and white and the whole place waits.

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It is easy to mistake that for nothing happening. What the tree is doing now is making oil. The phenols were settled months ago, when the pit hardened, and they begin to fall as soon as the fruit ripens. Oil goes the other way. The longer you leave the fruit on the tree, the more of it you get.

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So every grower is choosing where to stop. We stop early, before the fruit is mature, which means the tree never finishes the oil it could have made and we never collect it. That is the trade, and it is why our yield per tree is a fraction of what it could be.

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The work moved indoors

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Everything we can control has been happening in the sheds and at the mill.

The extraction line has taken most of our time, and every season we change something. This year the changes are about process control, giving us finer command over the conditions inside the line during extraction. Those are the conditions that decide how much of what is in the fruit ends up in the bottle. The adjustments are being finished and tested now, deliberately, while there is still time to find a fault and fix it. Once the olives start arriving there is no time to test anything.

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Then the unglamorous work that matters just as much. Nets checked, repaired and laid out ready. Combs counted for the hand harvest. The refrigerated truck serviced and running, because the cold chain either starts within minutes of the fruit leaving the tree or it does not really start at all. An olive that sits warm in a crate for a few hours has already begun to lose what we spent a year building.

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Away from the mill, the rest of it is logistics. The new packaging has been through its full round of testing and we are satisfied with it, which is a relief after the work that went into it. The new shop is being built, along with the fulfilment and cold chain arrangements that sit behind it. None of this is visible from the groves, and all of it decides whether the oil reaches you in the state it left in.

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The other crops

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The groves are not planted only with olives, and the families are busy with the rest of it while the olive trees are dormant in the heat.

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Figs are coming in now, and mulberries. The carobs and the pomegranates are being tended for later, since both come in after the olives are finished, which is why October is never quiet either. The aromatics carry on with almost no attention from anyone.

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This is what a grove looks like when it is not managed as a monoculture. Different crops on different calendars, ground cover between the trees, and a great deal of life that is not there to be harvested at all.

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Rest, briefly

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Some of us are taking some days off. This is the last chance of the year to do it.

Once the harvest starts the days are long and hard on the body, from first light until the last crates are in the cold. The weeks after the 31st are the hardest and the best of the year, and going into them tired is a mistake we have made before.

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The 31st

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The date is fixed. We begin harvesting on the 31st of August.
 

The crop is a good one this year. Better than we expected in spring, and better than last year. We will not put numbers to it until it is pressed and tested, but we are going into this harvest more optimistic than we have gone into any of the previous ones.

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Everything is done by hand. There are no shakers and no mechanical harvesters in these groves. People with combs and nets, starting early, moving tree by tree, and the fruit going straight into the cold. It is slow and expensive and it is the only way we know of doing it that protects what is in the fruit.

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An entire year of work comes down to those weeks. It is hard, and it is the part of the year we all look forward to.

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What happens after

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Two honest notes about what follows.

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During the harvest we will be slow to answer emails and messages. Some may go unanswered for a while. We would rather say so now than have you wondering whether your message arrived.

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And there is a gap between the picking and the shipping. Fresh oil needs a short settling period, and every batch is analysed before any of it leaves Cyprus. We will not put a date on it here, because the oil decides that and not us. When it is ready, everyone on our list hears from us by email, with a private password protected link to the shop.

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If you are waiting for that message, adding contact@oleaphen.com to your contacts now is the single most useful thing you can do. It is the difference between the letter arriving in front of you and the letter arriving somewhere you never look.

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If you are new here

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A number of people have found us over the past few weeks. If you would like to be told when the 2026 oil is ready, you can join our list here. There is nothing to pay and nothing to decide now. We write once a month from the groves, and when the oil is ready you will receive the link by email like everyone else.