Fruits of the season

It looks like another bumper crop this summer from our little patch of urban real estate.  Climate change? This indestructible White Concord grape vine was one of the first things I planted 35 years ago, and it's been cut back to the ground more times than I can remember. Nothing will kill it. Bugs hate it. The resident wine expert here says grape vines can be productive for over 50 years, and then hang around for another 50 or so after that.  Sort of like people.

They look tasty, but this isn't a table grape because of the big seeds and sour skin.  Folks would have been grateful for fruit like that in olden times, but we're spoiled with sugary grapes from the grocery store.  I still wish it was a Purple Concord like on our Pennsylvania farm-- that unforgettable taste of warm grape in September when you popped them out of the skins right into your mouth.

Farm kids my age remember gorging themselves on whatever fruit was in season.  I'm sure my mom made grape jelly, because she would never let good fruit go to waste. They may have even tried to make sweet concord wine for fun, but the Pennsylvania Dutch were not big wine drinkers, except for maybe a bottle of Mogen David on the holidays. My Grammy would have been shocked at the amount of wine consumed in this house (oh, well.)

I'm ashamed to say I never "do" anything with our grapes, and the coons eat them on the day they are perfectly ripe. While you can make fruit chutney out of almost anything, I've never seen recipe for grape chutney. I have a friend at the museum who makes frozen grape juice concentrate with hers and says it's wonderful.  She also says I am bad to waste mine. Perhaps that was a heavy hint.

These days I let the grape vine grow free-range style on the arbor where the awful Hummingbird Vine once lived. It must be over 20 feet long now.  I like walking under it except on drippy days-- it feels sort of European. Of course it will drop all those leaves in the fall and that big mass of soggy vegetation will have to be scraped up off the sidewalk. But I'm getting ahead of myself!  Enjoy the moment, Sue. We're starting our most beautiful stretch of Seattle summer weather and the early mornings are so lovely it almost breaks your heart.

As for plums, every branch is hanging down with heavy fruit. These are giant-sized Italian prunes.  I look at the puny ones at the store for 2 bucks a pound and think, "Ha! you call those plums?"

Last summer we guesstimated about 50 pounds came off the tree, and it looks like twice as many this year.  We ate as many as humanly possible and I cooked up two batches of plum jam and then canned some in pints to put on ice cream, cottage cheese and yogurt. I also made plum chutney for the first time and I hope I remember where I put that recipe-- it was great on ham and turkey. You never know exactly how chutney will turn out until it ages in the jar for a few months.  The raccoons got into the last bucket I left on the deck, but I was plum-tuckered out by then anyway.