Since I first introduced the idea of Gardeners' Holidays decrease lower back in 2013, I've celebrated the August holiday below a lot of names. For the first couple of years it became Squashmas, a celebration of zucchini, which reaches its top in early August (assuming the squash vine borers do not kill your flowers in advance than that). But in subsequent years, unique vegetation regularly displaced the zucchini, turning August 1 into a celebration of cherries, tomatoes, or cucumbers. And this year, a modern crop is taking middle degree: plums.
This is a huge trade from remaining 12 months, whilst a combination of brown rot and the depredations of squirrels left us with certainly no plum crop at all. (I assume we may additionally have managed to obtain two Opals.) So we decided to get severe approximately protecting our plums, developing what I think of because the three-Point Plum Plan: pruning, spraying, and wrapping the timber with paper covered in Tree Tanglefoot to discourage the squirrels.
This plan became out to be a blended fulfillment. Though Brian diligently sprayed the plums each week with the new Serenade spray we provided, plenty of them though grew to come to be brown, withered, and fell off the trees. However, early within the summer, he ran out of the Serenade spray and, in region of purchase more (because it didn't appear to be running all that properly besides), he switched lower back to the copper fungicide we'd used the three hundred and sixty five days in advance than. And this definitely seemed to be plenty extra powerful. It hadn't worked thoroughly the number one time, but that changed into even as Brian became attempting to take a look at it with an regular spray bottle, which couldn't attain most components of the tree. With our new sprayer, which attaches to the hosepipe, he become capable of observe the fungicide plenty greater thoroughly. We had been nonetheless seeing some plums rot, but a miles large percentage of them have been certainly surviving lengthy enough to begin ripening.
This, of path, was the component at which the squirrels stepped in. Well earlier than the plums were in truth ripe sufficient to choose out, they had been scampering up the tree to grab them. We tried girdling the trunks and the largest branches with strips of paper covered in Tree Tanglefoot, and this reputedly did seize them a few times, as we discovered tufts of grey fur sticking to the strips on a couple of event. But we couldn't block each unmarried branch this way, so those foxy rodents just found new routes to the plums, jumping over and round our improvised boundaries to acquire the fruit. Often they would depart the half of-eaten carcasses of the unripe plums scattered at the bottom of the tree, as if to taunt us. We speedy concluded that if we waited for the stop result to ripen surely on the tree, we might in no way get to taste any of them.
Now, it is apparently viable to pick out out plums while they're slightly underneath-ripe and ripen them interior. But how beneath-ripe is
The red Opal plums, which had been ripest to start with, obligingly ripened right up over the course of the next week or so. So, eventually, Brian went out and picked all the ones that were left on the tree, about 35 plums in total. Compared to last year's pitiful crop, it was a pretty good haul, and the plums were quite tasty, with sweet-tart, juicy yellow flesh. However, the purple Mount Royal plums from this batch were much less cooperative. They stayed obstinately hard for weeks, then suddenly turned to mush apparently overnight. Clearly, they hadn't been ready for picking.
So, about a week and a half ago, he picked a second batch and stored them in the same way, testing them periodically to see if they were actually ripening. This time, it worked out much better. He tried one Thursday morning and found that, while not quite ripe yet, it was almost there—and definitely riper than it had been when he picked it. So he decided they were ready, and went out and picked all the literally low-hanging fruit off the tree. He went out with our big 6-quart mixing bowl, and came back in with it piled high with plums. And that was only the first installment. He went out again that evening with the stepladder and filled the bowl a second time, and he made another trip out just now and climbed up the tree itself to get all the remaining plums that he could reach—maybe another quart or so.
So all told, we've harvested over a bushel of plums from the Mount Royal tree alone, plus the 35 Opals. (The plums on our third tree, a Golden Gage, are still green, so we don't know when we'll be able to pick those.) We've already eaten all the Opals, but if we succeed in ripening up all the Mount Royals, we'll have far more than we can possibly eat fresh. Even in the fridge, they'll only keep for about two weeks, and this is definitely more plums than we can consume in two weeks. If we want to enjoy the fruits of our labors, we're going to need some means of preserving them. And since we don't have a chest freezer or a food dehydrator, that probably means canning.
A quick search led me to this recipe/monograph on "awesome plum jam" on Serious Eats, penned by Kenji Lopez-Alt, who certainly should know what he's talking about. The recipe calls for a food mill, but he says earlier that using it is an optional step if you "like a bit more jamminess to your preserves." So we could make the recipe without one and just have chunkier preserves. (We'd also add what he calls the "optional" step of adding lemon juice to make sure the preserves are acidic enough to combat botulism, because we wouldn't want to take chances with that.)
So we've got a suitable recipe; the problem is the canning process itself. We don't have a pressure canner, and our little pressure cooker is too small to handle more than one jar—and even if we do our jars in a water bath, our biggest pot can only accommodate three quart jars or four pint jars at a time. But the biggest problem is that, every time we've tried it, we haven't actually managed to get the jars to seal. Brian thinks it might work better with small jars rather than big ones, so we'll try that, but that means we won't be able to process as many plums at once. So preserving this volume of plums will be quite a process, most likely requiring us to make and can multiple batches over the course of a single weekend. Watch this space for a future post on how that goes.
