The first to ripen was the cherry tree, around mid-November. The tree has grown strongly in the last year and I'm very pleased with it. The harvest was bigger than ever before. I'm pretty sure I took a photo of the fruit but I can't find it now. When I say "bigger than ever before", it was about 3 handfuls. I picked them while still underripe and laid them on a tray for a few days to ripen. We ate them with dessert for two nights in a row and then they were all gone. We only lost a few to birds.
The next to ripen was the apricot tree, around mid-December. The harvest was smaller than last year, about twice what you see in the basket in the photo (below). I stewed them and it came out to slightly less than one takeaway container full. I was lucky enough to be able to visit Mum at Christmas, and gave her a small, precious containerful.
I should mention the nectarine tree. It was having an 'off year' (apparently that's a thing). It produced many blossoms, but only two fruit grew from them. Then they were ruined while still only half-grown by the storms we had in December. The weather bureau reported widespread Brown Rot alerts to fruit farmers at that time -- it never occurred to me before that they apply to backyard single-tree gardeners like myself, too!
Last but certainly not least were the plums. They were still too small and hard to be affected by the brown rot, and we had a bumper harvest! despite my severe pruning of the tree last year to prevent it from producing too much. It seems that backfired, hm.
Harvesting fruit is fun -- looking amongst the leaves and selecting the ripest ones, feeling them still warm from the sun, placing them in the basket.
Despite my best efforts, some were eaten by birds. This photo (below) represents probably half of what was lost, but rest assured, it was only a small portion of the total produce! Towards the end, some dropped naturally as well, as I ran out of energy and skipped a couple of days of harvesting and processing.
I made sure to pick up all the dropped and bird-ravaged plums, as if left they might sprout into baby plum saplings. As nice as that sounds, I've learned from experience that it's not such a good thing -- they grow too close to the parent tree, so they need to be dug up (not to mention it makes mowing very difficult) and I never had a single one transfer to a pot successfully. And besides, I already get more plums than I can handle, even with just one tree!
I decided to process all the plums by stewing, bagging and freezing them. I didn't have the energy to make jam, and besides it's too hot in Summer! I can always defrost some and turn them into jam later if I want. I picked enough each day to fill the slow cooker, washed them and cooked them on High for about 2 hours.
I let them cool for a bit, then used the highly sophisticated method of fishing through them with a spoon to remove the stones. Each batch yielded about 3 sandwich-bag-sized bags, and there were 9 batches so that makes.... a lot of plums! Once frozen, they filled up about half the freezer (it needs defrosting, I know!). Once I'm able to visit my family again, they'll be sharing in the bounty. Sometimes when I open the freezer door, I think: if anyone else looked in here, they'd think I was a prepping vampire!
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