There is a Mexican plum tree at Shaw Nature Reserve that I particularly admire. It is on the edge of the trail in the area where the persimmons and ostrich fern grow. I collected three seeds from this tree and planted them in my back garden 8 years ago. Each tree seems to have it’s own personality with one growing straight up, one growing branches in all directions, and one leaning off to the east. They also bloom at slightly different times giving me a longer season of flowers in the spring. Each tree is also unique to fruit with the northern tree fruiting the heaviest and the easterly tree hardly fruiting at all. So much variety from one parent.
The fruits do not seem to be favored by the backyard wildlife or maybe there is just so much that everyone gets all they can eat. There are always some fruit left for me. To collect fruit I simply wait until they are ripe and fall off the tree and then pick them up off the ground each morning. The Mexican plums are larger then the other native plums but still much smaller then the grocery store variety. The fruit is tart and has a large pit so they are best suited for cooking in my opinion. We have had three good years so far to harvest plums and I experiment with a new recipe each time.
The first year we made plum chutney which was a rich dark concoction that tasted great spread on crackers with a mild cheese. We had enough to bottle up several small jars as gifts to family which were well received.
We also made plum jelly. Making jelly is easy with fruits that are difficult to peel and pit since that is not necessary. I made two batches of plum jelly but the second batch came out much more liquid so I called it plum syrup. They where both delicious spread on pancakes.
This years plum experiment was plum wine. My partner received a beer making kit for a gift and was eager to use it. I liked the young wine best since it tasted so sour and had a nice kick. After finishing the ferment the wine mellowed out to tart fruit flavored wine.
Some years there are not enough plums to harvest. One year the plums had such an infestation of aphids that all the early fruit buds were destroyed before the aphid lions on their slender threads arrived to save the trees. No one had plums that year. Other years there has been a late frost to freeze the buds or a drought that dropped the fruit too early. All conditions must be perfect to get a good crop of plums to harvest.
I’m open to suggestions for what to do with our next bumper crop. All of these recipes are worth trying again with small variations. The plums are too tart to work in any fruit recipe but ones with added sugar work well.
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