The community garden down the street has two plum trees -- one with small purple plums and the other with larger yellow plums -- that were just dripping with fruit this spring. Malin and I picked buckets of them over a couple of weeks. This week the temperature has been in the high nineties and I think the tree is finally done.
We made plum jam (which cooked way too long and turned into plum butter), baked a half dozen plum cakes and ate dozens fresh. We still had about 15 pounds of them left so we made plum brandy.
According to several recipes found on various blogs, the ingredients and process are simple. Fill glass jars with plums, add sugar, add cheap vodka and let sit for three months. We used quart jars and added 3/4 cup of sugar to each plus about a cup of vodka.
The jars are now on our counter awaiting a more permanent home for the rest of the summer. The white stuff at the bottom of the jars is sugar. It's been two days since we filled the jars and all that sugar has dissolved. One of the recipes says to flip the jars upside down every day. We'll probably do that for while until we go on vacation.
In other news, here is the potato harvest from one of my garden buckets. I honestly don't know how whole cultures survived on potatoes. I can't grow them.And now for the drum roll......along with yellow squash that is already overflowing, here are our first tomatoes and cucumber of the season. The cucumber was grown from seed and I think I started it mid-March. The tomatoes are Super Sweet 100s and were planted by my GS troop in mid-April. They were pretty big when they went into the ground.
Yum!
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