Yesterday's Bounty: 30-35 pounds of plums

Yesterday evening, we harvested another big bounty of plums! I estimate we picked at least 30-35 pounds, and probably composted the same amount, but probably more.

I'm documenting each of these harvests to keep track of how many pounds of plums and how many jars of jam we'll end up with during this season. So far, we've picked about 55 pounds of cream-of-the-crop fruit. Most has been made into jam (about 38 jars so far, with another 15 or so coming tonight), plus I gave another 6-7 pounds away to a couple of friends who were going to bake with them.

We divided last evening's harvest into two batches, and made one 10 pound batch of jam, which yielded 14+ 12 oz jars. We plan to do another batch tonight with the remaining. We decided early on in the jam making process this year to keep each batch in the 10 pound range. It's a a manageable size, and we've got a good system for it.

I think we have at least one more big harvest left on the trees - at least of what we'll be able to reach. There are certainly pounds and pounds of beautiful, ripe fruit high up the tree that we'll never reach. Unfortunately, they'll just have to all fall down and be composted.

For last night's batch, I used the same recipe that we've been using for 10 pounds of fruit:

10 pounds picked fresh plums = 24 cups of fresh fruit
cooked down to: 15 cups of cooked fruit (pitted and skinned)

8 cups of sugar
6 boxes of pectin (1-1/2 cups)
(mix 1/2 cup of sugar in with the pectin)
1 tbsp butter (to help reduce foam)

yield: 14-1/2 12oz jars


We're eye-balling this as another 30-35 pounds of plums! We sorted them again after this picture and will reduce it down to two batches of roughly 10 pounds each


another 14 jars of jam!