Plum Jam

Something we are blessed with here on our block, is several plum trees.  Great big old trees they are too.  Mostly they're those little red plums with yellow flesh that are rather sweet, but sickly sweet if left to go overripe.

The top part of the tree - taken from the top of the gully.

Last year, I only managed to pick the very bottom branches of the biggest tree.  That still became 9 litres of plum sauce, plus a large quantity of plum jam that my Mum made from the plums that she and Dad came and picked.

One tree I couldn't get close enough to, to be able to pick anything.  It was completely surrounded by thick gorse.  Another, I didn't realise was yellow plums and they all fell down while I was waiting for them to 'ripen'.  The remainder on my biggest and most prolific tree were cleaned up by the bulls that broke in.

Plums in varying stages of ripeness.

A couple of weeks ago, I checked the tree that had been fenced in by gorse last year.  When Hubby was cutting gorse this last winter and spring, I made a specific request that he clear around this tree.  There were quite a few plums, not quite ripe yet, but not too far away, so Miss Seven and I made it a plan to check it once a week.  We went and had a look to find no sign of any plums at all.  We've had some pretty rough weather lately, so I'm assuming that the wind got them.  Bugger.

We did the rounds, having a look at blackberries, elderberries and plums in all the spots where they grow and we can actually get near them.  We should have the first blackberries soon - in one patch there are the odd black ones, but quite a few red ones.  Elderberries are still not ripe, we'll check them again in a week's time.  But the plums are starting to ripen.

We picked about a kg from that prolific tree  It's quite fascinating the way that tree ripens.  It's down the gully in quite a narrow spot.  The plums start coming ripe on the north side first and take about a month more to ripen around on the south side.  There are a lot more plums still to ripen, they hang like grapes and bend the branches down from about 5m up to touch the ground.

The next question was, what would we do with these plums?  While my family love plum sauce, we still had plenty left from last year.  Hubby likes jam, but doesn't tend to eat a lot of it and Miss Seven doesn't seem to eat much jam at all.  I thought about it for a while and thought that perhaps if she were involved in making the jam, she might eat more of it.  So I asked her.

Plum Jam it was. :)

Plums simmering down to pulp.

The recipe in my old battered Edmonds Cookery Book called for 2.7kg plums.  After washing and sorting, I had 900g - time to divide the recipe by 3.  This meant I needed 650g of sugar.

At the same time I was making Strawberry Jam with the strawberries I'd picked (a handful at a time) and frozen.  This was a very bad idea.  I ended up with too much going on at once (and trying to sterilize my jars) and overcooked both jams.  They're both very thick and I left some burnt bits on the bottom of the pans.

That said, they still taste great.