Harvesting Wild Plums (Prunus americana)

One good thing about the unusually warm spring we had this year: we got a great crop of wild plums.  This far north, the plum crop is rather iffy, because a late frost often kills the blossoms.  But not in 2012.  I just finished making jam, fruit leather, and wine from the fruit of our plum thicket.

Wild plums gathered on our land.

The window of opportunity for harvesting these delicious little plums is very narrow.  No sooner do they ripen, than the wind knocks them to the ground, where they are relished by various forms of wildlife.  In fact, it was my chickens who alerted me to the fact that the plums were ripe.  When the roosters find something especially good to eat, they call the hens with a very specific cackle and they all come running.  (This, by the way, is why the Talmud, Eruvin 100b, says we should learn "courtesy from the rooster" -- he lets his hens eat first.)   When I heard my chickens calling and scratching back there in the plum thicket, I knew something was up!  Chipmunks and wild birds were also enjoying the feast.

Wild plums don't keep very well, which is why you will never see them for sale in the store.  If you want to preserve them, you have to process them right away.  We usually make jam, and this year I decided to make fruit leather as well.  The normal way to extract the pulp and juice is to boil the plums and strain out the pits and skins, but this kills the seeds.  I wanted viable seeds to sell in my eBay store, The Happy Rooster, so I pitted them by hand.  A messy job! 

For fruit leather, I loaded the pitted plums, skins and all, into the food processor, set it on puree, then dried the resulting mess in my food dehydrator (which has special inserts for making leathers.  I suppose you could also do it on waxed paper in a low oven.  I'm told the Indians used to dry the pitted plums in the sun, and I've heard of people making solar food dryers.)  These plums are pretty tart, so we tried both a sweetened and non-sweetened version.  Both are delicious!

Getting a clear jelly from these plums is next to impossible, but they make a pretty good jam if you strain out the skins and most of the yellowish pulp.  I use a colander for this, since it is too thick to go through cheesecloth.  This leaves me with a pink slurry.  Following an old traditional recipe, I add one cup of sugar per cup of juice, then boil until it "seals the tines of a fork," or jells when you cool a spoonful.  (I suppose there is a proper temperature if you use a candy thermometer, but I've always done it seat-of-the-pants.)   I find there is enough pectin in the plums to jell on their own, but if you have some apple juice to add, it makes a nice combination.  If for some reason your jelly doesn't jell, you can still use it as a delicious syrup on pancakes or ice cream.

The last product I made is (or soon will be) a gallon of plum wine.  I started making my own wines when we moved to rural Minnesota, because the only kosher wine we could find here was Manischewitz grape, which is cheap and sweet for the local winos but not a vintage that I enjoy.  Over the years I've experimented with making all kinds of wines, some better than others.  Just be sure to use wine yeast, which you can order online, not baking yeast.  My last batch of plum wine was pretty good.  I'll let you know in a few months how this vintage turns out.  L'chaim!

(To add wild plums to your wildlife landscaping, either buy trees from garden catalogues or, if you have the patience to grow trees from seed, you can get seeds from my eBay store, The Happy Rooster  while supplies last.  This is a native species that grows in zones 3-7.)

Wild plum blossoms in spring.  In addition to fruit,
these trees form a thorny thicket that birds like to nest in

Ground Zero "Survivor Tree" is a Tree of Life

This week was the first time I had heard of the Ground Zero "Survivor Tree," when President Obama laid a wreath there.  A quick Google search revealed several past articles about this tree, which I apparently missed before.  But now that the tree, (which is a callary pear originally planted at the World Trade Center in the 1970s) has received national publicity, everyone is aware of it. 

And I think it is a wonderful symbol.  Unlike the "cross" that was really just an iron support beam that landed upright after the explosions (and which got so much publicity as a "miracle" right after 9/11), the pear tree is a truly universal symbol that can be embraced by people of every faith or lack thereof.   Like a phoenix from the ashes (if I may mix my species metaphors here) this tree symbolizes life and hope.  For me, as a Jew, there is a double meaning, because the Torah is also called a "Tree of Life" -- and it is the Torah which gave our country its basic moral compass through the Ten Commandments, which include "Thou shalt not murder."   For other faiths and philosophies, too, the symbolism of a Tree of Life affirms positive values. 

Survivor Tree in 2002
(courtesy of NY Parks Dept)


Here's what the Survivor Tree looked like just a few months after 9/11 -- nothing much was left but the trunk and some stubs.  "It looked like a wounded soldier," said horticulturalist Richie Cabo of the New York Parks Department.  It was only 8 feet tall and barely alive when it was moved to their Arthur Ross Nursery in Van Cortlandt Park for rehabilitation. 

Pear trees have amazing regenerative abilities, and it was not long before the tree began to sprout new growth.  Cabo, who was just starting his career at the Parks Department at the time, spent nine years lovingly nursing the tree back to health. The tree is now 35 feet tall and has been transplanted to the Ground Zero memorial site, where Obama laid the wreath on May 5, 2011, almost a decade after the tree was damaged.

Some people have criticized "the press" for dubbing this a "survivor tree," claiming that the word "survivor" indicates defeat.  I strongly disagree. First of all, it is not the first tree to be called a "survivor tree"; there is also one at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing.  And secondly, a survivor is someone who overcomes tragedy against all odds -- and that is exactly what this tree did.   When you look at that charred stump as it was right after the attack, it seems impossible that it could ever regenerate  into a healthy tree.  But it did.  In the same way, we were deeply wounded at 9/11 but we were never defeated. 

"The survivor tree is a testament [to] our ability to endure, the symbol of our unshakable belief in a brighter future," said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who kicked off the 9/11 Memorial planting ceremony in December 2010.

Six other 9/11 survivor trees – three callary pears and three leaf lindens – are permanently planted near City Hall and at the Manhattan entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge.

The Survivor Tree recovered, September 2010
(Photo courtesy of forestsociety.org)

If a tree falls, you can definitely hear it!

Yesterday, as I was sitting at my computer, I heard a loud falling, sliding, crunching sound and assumed it was ice sliding off the roof (which has already happened before -- the other day a huge thick sheet of it came crashing down off the chicken coop as I was doing chores down there -- startling me and upsetting the chickens, who cackled for five minutes afterward.  Luckily this happened outside their pen and nobody got crushed.) 

When I went outside to look for the source of the latest crash, there was no sign of a snow pile on the ground, just the usual drips. Puzzled, I looked the other way -- and saw that the noise was made by the top of this tree snapping off in the wind and crashing to the ground.  This tree has been dying for a quite while and, since it's not close enough to the house to be a hazard, I had left it for the woodpeckers and nuthatches.   And they are still enjoying it -- I saw a Downy hopping up and down the fallen top this morning.  The debris scattered on the ground will eventually get picked up and probably used for firewood when I make maple syrup -- which will be soon if these warm days keep up.

I imagine this will also open up an area where the sun can shine in better.  Last time a tree fell in this windbreak, a patch of orange daylilies burst into bloom.   They had apparently been there since the previous owners of this land (I certainly didn't plant them) but had never bloomed until the tree fell.  Under this new topless tree, there is an old clump of peonies, probably planted back when these pines were little evergreens.  The peonies have bloomed for me, but it will be interesting to see if they do better now that the top of the tree is gone and better light gets in.

As you can see, I've been allowing other younger trees to grow in beyond the older ones, to maintain the windbreak, which is on the west side of the house.  It makes a big difference, both in winter when the winds blow and summer when the sun beats down, to have trees there.  In addition to stuff that has grown up on its own, I've moved quite a few young trees and bushes into the new row.  My grandson's Arbor Day tree got planted there, too.