It’s that time again–red juice dripping down the chin, sticky fingers, jam-making inspiring-plum season. This year William and I head to our friend Linton’s house where we picked a bucket of Santa Rosa, yellow, and red plums. It only took 20 minutes to fill the bucket. It was a lovely scene, with Linton’s chickens clucking around us and a top bar beehive in his neighbor’s yard to keep us company. When we got home, I cooked the plums with some water until they boiled down. Then I removed the pits (harder than it sounds, next year I’m going to pit them first) and cooked the jam with some pectin and honey. The jam is very sour, but William insisted on no sugar. I cooked some of it some more and added brown sugar but then promptly burned it. Shit. The good news? Once again, the pigs love burnt plum jam. We have about 20 jars of the unburnt but sour jam. Next up will be apricots….
The Urban Orchardist 
Mmmmmm. Sour Plum Jam sounds good. Sounds like a good place to start a fruit kimchi.
dear novella carpenter,
i’m so sad i missed you the other day. your project sounds sooooo awesome! i hope we get to work together on it. i just looked at the diagram of your farm, and i think i have some friends who live on your block. how did i miss the fact that you have a farm going on there?
let’s talk soon. i think we should be friends. you seem really cool.
samin
sour jam sounds great, good base for a chutney! i am just about to make some baby food with some fresh organic apricots for amaya; i’ll have to freeze it because she is not ready for them, but in the dead of winter she will be spoiled with yummy apricot baby food.
I’m doing my Santa Rosas now. They’re horrible to pit raw since they’re clingstones. What I did this year was to use an old deep fry basket and press them through after cooking. MUCH easier than the colander I used before, and you get pits nearly free of pulp.
I’m lurking here on your blog with great interest–I live in East Oakland near 35th Ave.
Our first year on our place I was delighted by the bounty of plums on the little tree in front of our guest house. I spent hours peeling and pitting the little things and making jam. I really wasn’t sure it was worth the effort for the 6 pints I got. The next year I had the kids gather the fallen fruit and take it up to what we used to refer to as “the deer garden” – a cleared area in the woods at the back of our place which former owners used to plant with winter rye to attract deer. We then had an extreme winter which killed the little tree and I must confess that there was a part of me which was happy to be rid of the guilt I felt for not making use of the fruit.