Olives

For a long time now, I've been wondering what I'm supposed to do with the upcoming olive harvest.

I met a lady in the park a few weeks ago, and she said we gave them olives last year. Feeling despondent about how utterly gross my olives still were the last time I tried them, I asked how hers turned out. Looking somewhat startled, she told me that they never taste theirs until Purim! That gave me hope, verily.

Last week, Ema II asked what the deal was with the zillions of olives in my fridge, and I told her. Bravely, she ventured forth and tried one. Some of the olives aren't quite ready yet, but most of them are actually good! The shock! The thrill! The relief that I didn't waste something like 30 hours picking and pickling those bad boys!

At the same time, that made me give serious consideration to next year: what will I do with those Shmita-sanctified olives? I looked it up in my handy-dandy Shmita book, but it didn't mention the topic. The issue, you see, is that an individual may only pick as much Shmita produce as his/her family will use in the next few days. So we'll pick the pomegranates in our yard twice a week or so, and hang a sign encouraging the neighbors to do the same. But olives... Well, it takes a couple of months before olives are edible, so I can't really pick them for "immediate consumption." And if last year is any indication, my neighbors have zero to little interest in keeping the olives from rotting (other than encouraging us to pick them, of course).

Hopefully, by the time next year rolls around we'll have a rabbi already, but meanwhile I'm curious. So I did some Googling, and ended up at The Institute for Torah and the Land of Israel. They have a Q&A section, so I copied and pasted a similar question that someone asked, tweaked it for my purposes, and submitted it. Shockingly, I got an answer that very same day! I'm pretty excited by that. (And it seems that the Rambam holds one may pick and prepare as many Shmita olives as one's family will use until the next olive harvest, so that's nice.)