It’s July, and here in the UK we’re in the middle of a heatwave! Most of my garden is looking a little bit dried up and sad, but next door’s tree is full of lovely ripe plums.
We’re currently between neighbours, and the plums were starting to fall off the tree and attract wasps. We didn’t want them to go to waste, so we’ve picked the ones we could reach and popped them into the freezer. Our current plan is to make some kind of plum liqueur with them, and give it to our new neighbours as a housewarming gift.
It turns out that one nice big eternal magpie pocket can easily hold 350 grams of lovely little ripe plums – and one tiny little pink caterpillar!
I definitely wouldn’t recommend leaning over the fence and picking your neighbours’ fruit… but if you know where to look you can quite often find plums and cherry plums growing wild. (The park close to my house has a couple of lovely cherry plum trees.) And it’s been so hot lately that blackberries are starting to ripen already, so if you’re lucky you might be able to spot a few nice juicy ones.
What are you going to put into your pockets this month?