waiting for plums

For weeks now, all around me has been an abundant plum harvest, people have been groaning under the weight of all the plums they have been gathering in, plums in abundance in the veg box and everywhere in the shops.  I even ate plum crumble and custard in the canteen at work last week.  So why oh why were my plums staying resolutely green?  Would they ever ripen?  Reading the River Cottage guide to Preserves, Pam the Jam confidently states that under-ripe fruit is the best for jam making, so I harvested my plum tree with a sad heart, thinking of the tart, tasteless jam these sad excuses for plums would produce.  Half of the plums have had to go onto the compost heap because they had split anyway.  A dark day.

On to the chopping and preparing of the plums.  Were they like bullets?........no ! they were soft, luscious, dripping......and the taste?.....sweet, lush, sunshine.    The scales fell from my eyes, I didn't have green plums, I've got a beautiful bucket of fragrant juicy greengages!!!

Here you can see them all chopped and ready to go in the maslin pan.  As you can see I chucked in a couple of imposter "proper"plums to make the quantity up to 1.5kg.   Later on I wished I hadn't put them in because the skins didn't soften as quickly as the greengages.

Amazingly, greengages (and plums, damsons, etc) have got kernels inside that smell strongly of almonds.  Who knew??  Its a little tricky cracking stones covered in slippery greengage flesh.....  They were eventually covered in boiling water and later slipped from their little tough jackets, unleashing their pungent almondiness.   Mmmmmmm......

1.5kg greengages simmering with 400ml water, waiting for 1.25kg sugar to be added.

7 jars of jam!

Next year I'll pick the fruit a good 2-3 weeks before the stage they were at yesterday because I lost half the crop to splitting  by waiting for them to ripen.  

I found the tree label in my album of notable plants (I used to keep all the labels, but have lapsed in the last 2 years)  I thought we had bought a plum.  The garden centre (Webbs) certainly sold us a plum.  But no, our tree is definitely a Cambridge Gage.