Harvest Time!

Today was harvest day for both my Bartlet pear and Satsuma plum trees!

I'm really happy with the plum tree, as thereby hangs a bit of a tale...

When I was a kid, I LOVED the dark, sweet plums you could find every so often at the grocery store. But more and more over the years, the only plums you could find were the tart ones. Okay, but not the amazing sweet ones I grew up with.

So when we moved here in 2012, I determined to find the right kind of plum tree so I could have those danged plums again. LOTS of online research later, I settled on a dwarf (I'm short and gotta be able to reach the dang things) self-pollinating Satsuma plum...it sounded like the right one...

When we installed our backyard landscaping/plants in 2015, I was able to find ONE of those at our local greenhouse center. Here it is, in the center:

Then...I waited.

For eight years.

Over the last couple of years, the plum tree has flowered...but no fruit.

Then suddenly this May--yay, fruit! And a LOT of it! Nobody was more surprised than me, I'd long since written the tree off.

 Cue more waiting, because long about July the plums just kinda reached a ripening point...and plateaued. They never got bigger than this.

They got redder, but just--stopped doing anything, it seemed. They were fairly hard and TART, not the deep purple, sweet plums I was hoping for. At the chicken swap in July, another lady was selling little baskets of the same Satsuma plums as I had...and they were just as tart as mine.

Sigh...

Damn. Well, at least the chickens enjoyed them--in fact, we couldn't keep them out of the tree.

As evidenced by Exhibit A, Garibaldi and her plum-covered beak.

 Cleaned her up a bit for more pictures. She sure is cute, although has gotten to be so obnoxious lately we've taken to calling her 'Garibitey'.

Obligatory Communist propaganda poster pose:

So anyway, here it's September and I've given up on the tree. I finally decided to make some plum jam out of the fruit. Went out to pick some to get started sorting so I can make jam, this is about 1/3 of the amount of fruit on the tree...

 Tasted a couple, just to make sure...

...and WHAM! Dark, SWEET plums! 

 Exactly as I remembered!

They didn't get any bigger, but the taste...is amazing! The kind of thing where they never make it into the house, you stand under the tree and gobble them down.

Now with some of our eggs for scale. The plums are roughly the size of ping pong balls.

I'm gonna sort out 'eating' fruit from 'canning' fruit--the bruised/damaged ones will become jam. Also some of the nice ones will go with my husband to work tomorrow to share with coworkers.

Can't wait to taste the jam from these, so proud of my little Satsuma plum for coming through for us at last!

My Bartlett pear tree, meanwhile...

Well--it's the struggling kid of the family. This is its entire crop, but I will say it's doing better than last year. The fruit isn't much bigger than the plums, and I wage an ongoing war with coddling moths. I don't spray/treat any of my fruit with insecticides, I settle for Tanglefoot-coated muslin strips wrapped around branches at strategic spots to stop the coddling moth larvae from crawling up to infest the fruit. It mostly works, but I know I'll still find some damaged fruit when I cut these open. Not sure if I'll get enough pears to make jelly with, but we'll see. In the future I may have to cave when it comes to the pear tree and spray it when it comes time for it to set fruit.

But overall, I'm really happy tonight! The Macintosh apple tree out front has maybe a dozen apples on it--it's a struggling child, as well--but they aren't anywhere near ripe yet.

Looking forward to jam-making this weekend! 

The next day, September 29--Post script--the kid and I just picked another 23 pounds of plums, just like yesterday and the tree is stripped of fruit...so our yield is around 46 pounds of plums.

Canning, ahoy!