This year was really good for fruit trees and bushes of all kinds. I already mentioned the overabundance of raspberries, and it did not end there. I only have two tiny blueberry bushes, but they were covered in fruit too. And the rootstock of my plum delivered, for the first time ever, not just an occasional fruit here and there, but several kg of them.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I finally went to the trouble of identifying it, and it is the so-called “myrabelan plum”. The fruit is sweet, but the flesh cannot be separated from the stone. Usually it was not a problem, since we had always so few I managed to eat them fresh. However, I cannot eat several kg of fruit, so we decided to make a marmelade. And we found out that the fruit can be shortly boiled in a small amount of water and then pressed through a colander. The stones and skins remain behind, and the pulp goes through. Some of the pulp is lost, as it remains clinging to the stones, but it is quick and efficient enough.

Here are the ingredients my mother used to make the marmalade:

4 kg of myrabelan plums, 7 apples, 2 kg of sugar, 80 g of vanillin sugar, 1 teaspoon of citric acid, a pinch of salt, 80 g of gelling agent.

The resulting marmalade is a bit sour, which suits me just fine.

The plum tree is so covered with fruit that two branches broke. I will have to cut them off later in the fall and sanitize the cuts, although the tree is probably approaching the end of its life.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

There is probably over 100 kg of fruit in that single tree. The traditional way of using it is to make moonshine, but I do not drink hard liquor, and it is a rather laborious way to make window cleaner. So we probably won’t be able to use all, or even most of it. I harvested five buckets so far. I swapped one bucket with my neighbor for pears, one we gave away and today I de-stoned another bucket, cut them in half, and put them into dehydrators. They are surprisingly healthy – there were barely any worms in them, and I had to throw away just a few out of the whole bucket.

Whilst I was making prunes, my mother was making compotes. She stacked de-stoned and halved plums into jars, and once the jars were full, she covered them with a hot syrup made from 1,5 l of water and 1 kg of sugar with a pinch of salt. On top of each jar, she then poured 1 teaspoon of rum and closed it with a sterilized lid while still hot. After that, she sterilized the jars in the oven for 50 minutes at 80°C. This way, the plums do not completely soften into a soft mush, and they can still be used for pies or dumplings.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

My apple tree has died due to vole damage, but a few years ago, I managed to graft two twigs on some unknown apple that sprouted between my aronia and the bird feeder. I think it is the rootstock of an apple tree that was planted there by my grandfather and that had to be felled when I was about 10 years old. The grafts did bear fruit a few years ago, and this year they have outdone themselves. I had to support the branches with aluminium bars, otherwise they would surely break. I have been eating apples for breakfast for two weeks, and there is still more than enough on the tree. We will probably have to dry them too. Well, dried fruit is certainly a healthier snack than chips.