Plumpocalypse!!!

You may remember that less than two weeks ago, we "harvested" about 24lbs of cherry-sized plums from one of our plum trees in our backyard. That turned into 22 12-oz jars of jam a few days later.

The first harvest came from the two smaller trees on the side of the yard.

We still have a much larger plum tree in the back of the yard, but the plums weren't as ripe as the ones on the first trees.

We *should* have harvested them this past weekend, but somehow didn't get around to it.

My parents came over today to help me with the yard work in the backyard. The first thing we did was fill two 5-gallon buckets with all of the plums that had fallen from the trees onto the ground in the last week. Those were put into the compost bin.

Here's what the back patio looked like before we picked up all the fallen plums.


patio full of fallen plums

While we were doing the yard work, every few seconds we would hear little "thuds" from the back of the yard - more plums falling off the trees. I would go to the back every five minutes or so to pick up a dozen or more plums each time.

We took a break after we finished the yard work, and then had dinner.

After dinner, we went out again with the intention to pick as many plums off the back tree as we could. It had been only about 2 hours since we had finished cleaning up the backyard - imagine our surprise when we saw dozens of plums that had fallen from the trees within that time! Dick was home at this point, so he brought the ladder out, and we used the same "Dick on the ladder pulling down the plums, while 2-3 of us hold a sheet underneath". It's a good system!!

Well, 20 minutes later we had between 65-70 POUNDS of plums!! This did not include the other 10+ pounds of plums that we decided to discard because they didn't look as good. With over 60+ pounds of plums, we figured out pretty early that we could afford to be picky.

I forgot to take a photo of the tree this morning before we picked the plums tonight. Shame on me. I did remember to take an "after" picture, though.

Here's the thing - we didn't come close to picking even 1/3 of the plums on that back tree! The remaining ones either need to ripen a bit more, or their just too darn high for us to reach.


a close-up of the tree, and all of the plums still left


The full tree - you can see that we harvested the bulk of the right side of the tree, which covers the patio

I sent my parents home with the "smallest" of the 3 bags of plums. It weighed about 20lbs.

That leaves me with at least 45lbs. still.

I'm going to make jam either tomorrow or Sunday night.


two bags full of plums. they total about 45-50lbs. This does not include the 20lbs bag I gave my parents!

I expect we'll be doing at least another, maybe two more harvests over the next couple of weeks. Good grief!!

Judy - can I deliver plums to you sometime in the next week or two?