On Sunday the gleaners came and picked our plum trees in the front yard. They got 290 pounds of plums, and we had them leave about 50 pounds for us. Gave one of the big buckets to our neighbors across the road, as they are always so generous with their garden produce, and gave an ice-cream bucket to a friend who is on a tight budget ... she'll be making fruit leather.
Sunday afternoon I tried my hand for the first time at making jam. Plum / nectarine jam, to be precise. I didn't do the best job as I added water which belonged in a different recipe, and ended up making the "jam" more like a sauce that would be tasty poured over ice-cream or perhaps on cereal. Maxx used it yesterday as a glaze on his steak for dinner and said it was really good.
Today, I cut up a bunch of plums and am STILL drying them in the oven ... so I don't think I'll be doing any more drying soon. After I got them in the oven (this is at like 1:30pm earlier today), I did up a batch of just plum jam (plums, water, sugar, lemon juice), which didn't take nearly as long to cook (cutting up the plums took almost an hour) and does seem to be jelling nicely. However, 2 1/2 hours work to get 2 litres of jam!
Tomorrow Maxx is off, so hopefully he'll be awake on my lunch break and able to assist me with processing more of the plums. We need to get them all jammed or preserved before they rot away! At least so far we have 4 1/2 litres of plum/nectarine jam, 2 litres of plum jam, a tray of drying plums, and still have most of one of the big buckets of plums left to preserve.
We'll be making a dash up to Penticton on Saturday, back home on Sunday ... so we plan on hitting at least one of the fruit stands on our way home, to pick up some different fruit to process when we get home. Good thing I have the Monday off, as I believe I will be BUSY ... and will need to purchase some more jars, too!
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