Plum Tree Fruit Harvest 2015

It is that time of year again. Harvest time. Time to pick and enjoy all those luscious fall fruits that hopefully you previously planted in your backyard so you can reap the fall harvest too. If you did not plan ahead and get fruit trees planted, fall is still an excellent time to plant out container grown fruit trees

Anyone who knows me well realizes that I am crazy about fruit. All kinds of fruit. Passionate about fruit. Dreaming of fruit. Sweet, juicy fruit. Tart fruit. Pies, jams, jellies, tarts, cobblers, strudel and kuchen. Home canned fruit too.

It is now the season of prune plums. I just love plums! I suppose I should start this story at the beginning. During my youth, my family went to town every Sunday to attend church. Afterwards we usually stopped at the drugstore before heading home. Often in fall, a small boy would be outside the drugstore with a card table set up. On it he had lunch bags full of prune plums for sale. Every time we saw him, my father would buy a bag of plums and give them to his 5 children.

What joy! So sweet and delicious. I doubt any of those plums ever made it all the way home. We had great fun snacking on such horticultural wonders and then promptly spitting out the pits thru the car windows as we drove along (yes children were easily amused back then despite the lack of today’s modern electronic devises).

Someday I vowed to have a plum tree of my own. But time went by and my dream was forgotten. One day after enjoying some store bought plums, I realized I had no excuse not to plant a plum tree. Land, time and knowledge were all available. So I bought a small plum tree and got it planted.

A few years later it bore its first crop of 22 wonderful plums. The next year it bore 45 plums. The following year it yielded 145 plums. This year the crop came to 300 plums! Yes one of my childhood dreams has come true. All the plums I can possibly eat. I can now concede that I have gone plum crazy!

Now the difficult task. What to do with all the plums?