Plum loco

Over the past few weeks, Brian and I have been keeping an anxious eye on our plums — specifically, the ones on the Opal tree, which are the first to ripen. We had already manged to harvest several, but there were still a lot of half-red ones on the tree. We know from experience that if we pick them too soon, they won't ripen indoors, and they'll just go to waste. But we've also discovered that if we leave them too late, something else is liable to get to them before we do. 

This year, we seem to have done a fairly good job foiling the squirrels with our paper collars coated in Tree Tanglefoot. Unfortunately, other pests have stepped in to take over the assault where the squirrels left off. Last week, I spotted a doe in the front yard calmly helping herself to both plums and foliage, and I got within about a foot of her before she finally decided to start ambling away. Fortunately, she could only reach the parts of the tree within three or four feet of the ground, but that limitation doesn't apply to the birds, which have taken to pecking at the plums on the topmost branches and then dropping them about half-eaten to the ground. This makes a huge mess of the yard, and while the smallest groundhog sometimes comes through and munches on the fallen ones, he doesn't do it regularly enough to clean them up entirely. (We even caught one human red-handed in the act of plundering our plums, loading up a bag she had brought with her. When Brian called to her to stop, she insisted on giving us some money to pay for them, so I guess we've technically sold our first home-grown crop.)

Last week, after Brian and I had spent a laborious hour cleaning up fallen plums in the yard only to find it covered in corpses again by nightfall, Brian finally blinked. He went out and gathered all the plums he could reach without a ladder that were ripe enough to come loose when pulled. The next day, he fetched a stepladder and went for the ones slightly higher up, while I roamed around below gathering up the fallen ones and setting aside those that looked like they might still have some edible material on them. By the time he was done, he had picked all of these — 47 pounds in total.

This presented us with a new problem. We knew we couldn't possibly eat that many plums ourselves before they went bad, so we would have to either preserve them or share them or, most likely, both. We had some success canning plum jam in 2019, but the crop we got then was nowhere near this size. If we wanted to preserve all these, we'd have to make a lot of jam — and this was only the first tree's worth. (It is possible to freeze plums, but with only our little fridge freezer, we just don't have the space to store many.)

Brian had already picked up some Pomona's Universal Pectin, the variety that works best for low-sugar canning, at the George Street Co-Op in New Brunswick. Unfortunately, they had only one package — enough for maybe four batches. Yesterday, he spent a very sweaty morning putting up his first batch of eight half-pint jars in 90-degree heat, using the recipe that came with the pectin, which called for very little sugar and quite a lot of lemon juice. Right now, he's working on a second batch using Kenji Lopez-Alt's recipe from Serious Eats, which is lower in lemon and higher in sugar (though still much lower than most recipes made with plain pectin). But at four pints per batch, the equivalent of about four pounds of plums, four batches won't make much of a dent in our 47 pounds of plums. And even if we can find more of the Pomona's pectin somewhere, we just can't process them fast enough to turn the lot into jam before they spoil.

So basically, in addition to eating all the plums we can swallow ourselves over the next week or so, we're going to start feeding them to pretty much everyone we come into contact with. We'll put out a big bowl of fresh plums for our RPG group on Tuesday, Brian will take in a bunch to work to offer to his coworkers, and anything that's still left on Thursday will go with us to Morris dance practice, which is finally resuming after a 16-month hiatus. And if there are still plums left over, we'll drop by my parents' place on the way home to spread the wealth around still more.

And all this is just for one tree's worth of plums. The Mount Royal plums, the blue ones, are just starting to ripen now, so we'll probably have to go through the whole process again with those, and possibly yet again with the Golden Gage plums after that. And by the time we're done with all that, we'll probably never want to see another plum again.

On the plus side, it does give us an early start on our holiday gift shopping. No matter what else we may or may not find, we'll have enough home-canned jam for everyone.