Some are rich and deep. Some are bright and floral. Some are perfect for baking, while others are so sweet and soft they barely make it back to the house before being eaten. They’re the sort of fruit that tends to turn a quick walk through the orchard into an unexpected snack break.

We’re growing Italian prune plums, greengage plums, an unidentified heritage yellow plum with strangely tropical flavours, and a few young Japanese plum trees that are still getting established before they begin producing.

Italian prune plums are probably our favourite for baking. They have a dense, rich sweetness and hold their shape beautifully in pies, cakes, galettes, crisps, and basically anything involving butter and flour. They also dry exceptionally well and make fantastic prune plums with concentrated flavour that feels far more elegant than the word “prune” usually suggests.

Greengage plums are one of the stranger looking fruits we grow and also one of the tastiest. They’re a heritage English plum with fairly plain greenish skin and an almost unfair level of sweetness inside. Rich, syrupy, and intensely flavoured, they’re incredible fresh and make outstanding jam. They are also the kind of fruit that causes people to quietly reconsider whether appearance is actually all that important.

Then there’s the mystery plum. We honestly don’t know exactly what variety it is, which somehow makes it even more entertaining. The fruit is small and yellow, but the flavour leans wildly tropical. Pineapple, mango, citrus, maybe something else entirely depending on who you ask. It tastes less like a plum trying to be a plum and more like a plum having a bit of an identity crisis.

We’ve also planted several Japanese plum varieties that aren’t producing quite yet, but we’re excited to bring even more colour, texture, and flavour into the mix as the trees mature.

Like a lot of fruit at the orchard, plum season doesn’t last forever, which is probably part of what makes it so enjoyable. A few weeks each year where the trees suddenly become loaded with fruit and everyone starts talking about what they’re baking, preserving, or eating standing over the kitchen sink at 10 o’clock at night because they accidentally bought too many plums again.