If you grow it, you will eat it

Last year, we had a massive crop of courgettes. So we ate a lot of courgettes and felt that special gratification you feel when you’ve done something good for yourself without even trying.

This year, we had zero courgettes. All the plants were damaged in early June when the heat hit and they never recovered. But the plum tree stepped in — it stepped in big time.

Our primary plum tree is an unassuming little thing growing right next to what we call the summer kitchen although it is not really worthy of the name being only used for roasting fish, drying onions, and storing firewood for the winter. The tree has undergone a long process of recovery after Cris cleared the ground around it, going from a few flowers and fruit a year to the huge crop it bestowed upon us this year.

We also have a secondary plum tree, close to the first one, possibly an offshoot, which is also being grateful for Cris saving it from weeds because it has also been flowering more and bearing more fruit every year for the past three years. It’s wonderful to see your efforts mean something.

Anyway, we had a tonne of plums. There’s three of us and neighbours have their own plum trees, which is one of the awkward moments of country life. You can’t dump your extra produce on the neighbours because they have extra, too. There was no way we could eat all the plums before they went bad but there was also no way we were letting them go bad.

Step one was, of course, eating them fresh. Cue that feel-good sense of inadvertently taking care of ourselves because plums are excellent for good digestion and they’re full of potassium and vitamins C and K, and other chemical goodies. Also they happen to be delicious.

Step two was freezing. We all like a fruit cake, which here means a cake with either fresh or frozen fruit rather than the British dried or candied varieties. Irina pitted a few hundred plums and stacked them in neat, 250 g bags to secure our cake future during the winter month.

Incidentally, we’re also well stocked on pears because our early pear tree outdid itself with small, hard to eat fresh fruit and we managed to save some before they started rotting, which happens fast with that tree. Currently, it is a rose chafer empire — apparently, they breed in the pears or something.

Thanks to the plums and the pears, the fruit section of the freezer was now full. But there were a lot more plums ripening on the tree. This left one last option because there was no way we were turning on the food dryer in 37 C heat and anyway nobody in the house really likes dry plums. So we were going to make plum jam.

Plum jam is something everyone in the family likes, which we only learned now because we had never had to think about plum jam before and we don’t really buy jam regularly because we seem to share the assumption that jam is something you make, not something you buy (unless a recipe calls for jam or you’re really craving some raspberry jam and there’s no raspberry in sight).

More plums were pitted, washed and chopped into an unappetising pink mess, combined with sugar and put on the stove. The unappetising mess gradually turned a rich ruby red, it thickened and less than two hours later we had six jars of plum jam. One’s already gone because Cat has discovered she loves plum jam as well.

A lot of people with no access to a garden buy their fruit at the market and make jams and compotes for the winter. The mentality that you must make preserves for the cold months is still with us even though the actual need is absent.

In the country, the need is there — not only the need to provide some form of fruit and vegetables for the family during the dark, cold months but the need to do something with what your land has produced. Letting anything go to waste is not an option.