Turns out we have damsons. (For the non-gardeners among you, damsons are basically small plums.) In fact it turns out we have masses and masses of excellent damsons.

Last year our best damson bush had maybe 20 plums. The older bushes and trees, some of which look near death, hardly had anything. We were seriously discussing taking them all down.

Luckily we’ve had other, more highly prioritized gardening projects, so the bushes are all still there. And this year they are laden with damsons, the boughs bending almost to the ground with rich, dense bunches of fruit.

During the past ten days, we’ve been picking several litres of damsons – well, not daily, but roughly every other day. The ground underneath the bushes is mostly soft, so we let the plums fall and pick them from the ground. (Ingrid particularly likes shaking the bush to make more of them fall.) This way I don’t have to squeeze every plum to figure out whether they’re ripe or not. A few fall on the moister, mossier side of the bush get eaten by snails and slugs, but the rest are in great shape. Birds don’t seem to like them, unlike our cherries.

They’re a pain to stone, because they’re so small, and the stones are not loose. It’s a messy, sticky job. But they taste great!