Plums

When we bought our house, six years ago, there was a plum tree at the end of the yard. It gave up some plums and they were good plums, too. Plums that you don't often see in supermarkets around here...they type with purple skin and red meat.

Well, this tree was at least 20 years old and hadn't been trimmed in a long time, so come winter, I had Ralph cut it back. We cut it back pretty severely, but it needed it. The next year, we got some plums, not a huge amount, but it was growing back in, filling in with new shoots for all the trimming we'd done.

But the following year, oh, that year, we had a bonanza of plums! We ate our fill, gave bags and bags away and still had more. It's been like that ever since. This year, once again, we have a bumper crop. Our one plum tree has produced hundreds of plums!

Now, our tree is 100% organic. I feed it nothing.....nothing! I just gets water and sunshine, that's it. We never use pesticides of any kind in the back yard, not with kids and dogs and cats hanging out there, we couldn't even think about it.

I already invited one neighbor to come and take as much as he wanted and he took about 25 lbs with him. What to do with all these plums???

Well, since we'd just canned a few months ago, I called up my friend, Ruth, and asked her if she were interested in doing another canning session. Luckily, she was. We canned some awesome plum jam. It looks so pretty, because the meat of the fruit is red, it has that really purple plum look to it:


Since we just canned not that long ago, we had a routine down pat and it went really well. We were able to can 2 batches in 4 hours.

I love the idea, that, come winter, I'll have a little bit of summer around to taste!