With the first hard frost under our belts, everyone in town is probably doing what we are doing: Staring at piles of green tomatoes in our living room, preparing for an applesauce-a-thon, and harvesting plums. It might seem funny to suggest that all the residents of Missoula have plum trees, but it is not far from the truth. This town has plum trees like you would not believe. I think there must have been a Johnny Plumstone about forty years ago. In our neighborhood, plums are sort of a tree-zucchini; at a certain time of year, everyone has so many plums that they are just giving them away.


Our tree is a late plum, which is convenient because our neighbor's tree matures in late August (summer plums) while ours just started to ripe now (frost dependent plums). Both are "freestone" varieties, which means they are simple to pit. One fun thing about our plums is that you can take advantage of the fact that they take quite a long time to ripen by mailing them to your friends. That's right- plums by mail! I send them out in bubble mailers to anyone that wants some, and they are typically just getting barely ripe when they arrive in mid October. Yes, it is inefficient, but its entertaining and I enjoy it.


Our plum tree is surrounded by chicken netting, which makes picking all but the most nearby plums a royal pain. So this year I got creative and built a plum picking device to make the harvest go more smoothly.

My plum picker was a large clean shampoo bottle with a teardrop-shaped hole cut into one side, mounted onto a broom handle with duct tape. You position the plum dangling into the bottle so that the stem is lined up with the pointy top of the tear-drop, snag your plum's stem, give a gentle tug, and the plum falls down into the bottle. I figured out I could pick about 8 or 9 plums before emptying the bottle, and my reach was elongated by about 6 feet. This design was not something I came up with completely off the top of my head, by the way - I've seen a similar thing made from metal and a cloth basket that I think professional fruit pickers probably use.