Sometimes you pick plums...

Still on the garden theme, there was a plum tree in the front yard when we moved in to this house. We pretty much ignored it for the first 7 years or so and it turns out, you're not supposed to do that to fruit trees. Some years it would give a little bit of plums, some years a lot, and some no plums at all. We had no idea why, and that was fine, until the pandemic got us gardening haha. It is one of the few trees we have and it is very pretty in spring, they bloom and look like white cherry blossom trees: 

A tiny Bushtit pollinating the plums!

A Lesser Goldfinch hanging out on the plum tree

A Black Capped Chickadee pollinating the plums!

The Lesser Goldfinch having some nectar too...

A crow on our power line, with the flowering plum tree in the background. 

So the birds and bees love it, and it looks really pretty, and is signals the start of spring, so all around a win for everyone haha. This happens in spring, around mid March, and then the blossoms fall off, and the pollinated flowers turn into plums over the coming months. Eventually, in mid to late August, this is where it's at: 

The plums we have are very different from store plums. They're smaller, green, and more sour, but also sweet. I really like them. And I'm not huge on plums, but these are really tasty.  We suspect it must be a wild variety perhaps. Around August 2020, while we were harvesting the plums of that season, the neighbor saw me struggling to pick the plums up high. We had let the tree get like 20+ feet tall, and that was not smart. Most of the fruit was unreachable, even with a ladder. So he offered to help me trim down the tree, a lot. We easily chopped more than half of the tree off. It was hard because we needed to make sure the main trunk fell in a specific place and not crush his roof or ours. Usually I'm very reluctant to trim plants, I always think I'm going to hurt them or make them less productive. It's not intuitive to me that you chop things off, and the plant would respond positively. But that's how it works. We chopped it down to like 6 or 7 feet tall, and it looks funky, but this year it gave the most plums it ever had, even at this reduced height. We got over 40 pounds of plums! 39 pounds from the older tree, and like 5 from the younger one, it was crazy! For reference, in 2020 we got 13 pounds of plums from both trees and that was a good year, so this year was a lot! 

From just the big tree!

We're supposed to thin the fruit before it goes crazy like this, like the branches were almost touching the floor because of how heavy with fruit they were. This is not good because a branch could break and lose all the fruit but also damage the tree. Thankfully, it didn't happen, but we'll be thinning the fruit next time....maybe haha. It's hard to remove fruit for this reason haha We shared some with the neighbors, we made jam, we ate LOTS of plums and didn't buy any fruit for like 3 weeks. 

Plum jam, lots of it!

Removing pits from the plums was definitely the most tedious part.

Sophia helping us pick plums -_- Notice the funky tree shape due to the heavy pruning. 

Froze a gallon of plums, maybe for a future plum pie. We may not get many or any plums next year, because we got so much this year, but hopefully we still do.