Macédoine

I had a brief scare earlier this week, thinking I’d have to miss today’s harvest, but I managed to make it work, since we were picking both the first plums of the year, as well as kumquats.

All new houses for us this week. I did have to arrive late, so I missed most of the plum harvesting itself (and singularly missed the opportunity to photograph shaking plums down onto a tarp, but there will be plenty more of that later this summer.) But I helped sort. The plums probably could have been picked last week, but that meant that there were lots and lots of soft, ripe and cracked fruit for us to take home. I managed to squeeze the second batch of strawberry jam I made yesterday into my rather miscellaneous stock of leftover jars, but preserving plums will require a new capital outlay.

We had a reporter from Silicon Valley Community Newspapers join us today, and we loaded her down with fruit to take home. We may even get her back to volunteer later.

After plums came the kumquats, a big tree loaded with big, sweet kumquats. The best yet this year.

Julia tried to teach me the word for plum, but I haven’t yet moved past YOdz and pee-paw.

We pick kumquats until we run out of time and/or patience, not until we strip the tree. We ended up with five boxes, so maybe 100 lbs for 45 minutes’ worth of work.

The last house had a truly enormous orange tree, about as big as the huge grapefruit tree last week. This is the 14-foot ladder for scale.

I’m so excited that stone fruit season is finally here!