Olive Picking Day Attracts New Members and Volunteers to Santa Inés Mission Mills
SBTHP Staff at Olive Picking Day. Photo by Anne Petersen.
On Saturday, December 14th, 2024, the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation (SBTHP) held its annual Volunteer Olive Picking Day at the historic Santa Inés Mission Mills property. SBTHP staff including Anne Petersen, Mike Imwalle, Yvonne Leal, Jordan Hitchens, and Rae Mottus participated in the event.
New SBTHP volunteers Jeff Sherwood, Jay Sherwood, Lori Haney, Lisa Casillas-Siemsen, and Steve Siemsen, were joined by veteran olive pickers John Petersen, Terri Imwalle, Melissa Hausz, Steve Hausz, David Stone, and Bev Schwartzberg.
This winter, we decided to switch gears from milling the olives for olive oil production to curing ripe fruit and producing table olives. When we scheduled the picking date back in November, the olives at Mills property were less ripe, so we made a plan to procure green olives for curing. However, immediately upon arriving at the Mills property olive groves on the morning of December 14th, we found that the prior two weeks of unseasonably warm weather had ripened the olives considerably; and that there were very few green olives left.
A quick decision was made to pick the ripe fruit only, and to then dry cure the ripened olives with salt. The volunteer pickers were given instructions to avoid green fruit and were asked to only pick black olives with smooth skin. All in all, SBTHP staff and volunteers picked approximately 250 pounds of ripe olives!
Keeping a long-standing tradition alive, the group was taken on a post-picking tour of the Santa Inés Mission Mills by SBTHP staff. Volunteers toured and learned more about the grist mill, reservoirs, and fulling mill.
Heading for tour of Mill. Photo by Leeann Haslouer.
Tour of fulling mill. Photo by Leeann Haslouer.
Santa Inés Mission Mills Agricultural & Maintenance Supervisors Tom Walton and Leeann Haslouer hosted the event and provided the picking team a delicious Italian-style lunch, with pizza, calzones and salad from Gino’s Pizza in Buellton.
After lunch, SBTHP staff delivered the day’s harvest to former SBTHP Board President Craig Makela’s packing facility at California Coast Naturals in Venedito Canyon. There, the olives will go through a process of curing and bottling. We hope to have dry salt-cured olives for sale in the Presidio Gift Shop as early as February 2025!
Delivering olives to California Coast Naturals. Photo by Michael H. Imwalle.
Dumping and sorting olives at California Coast Naturals. Photo by Terri Imwalle.