Plum time and taxing windfalls

Our little plum tree has failed us this year, but walking the dog is a pilfered fruity buffet. Holiday special: no forced public policy metaphors; just abundant free soft fruit. And puns.

Plums are upon us. Purple blotches under foot are clues of unpicked bounty overhead. Indigo smears on parked cars. Thank you, happy birds.

Scenes below and above

Our little tree completely failed us, but across the street Tall Peter¹’s plums are a plenty though still sour. We also walk the dog in the recreation ground behind his back fence, hard by the village tennis courts, and pick damsons galore from his tree.

In May we lost a frisbee in Tall Peter’s overgrown hedge so it seems like natural justice. The dog still searches for the frisbee.

We then nip through the broken gate into Philip’s garden to pinch more damsons from the same tree. Unpicked fruit and windfalls are a common wealth, a public good (strict economists would disagree as eating excludes others). The tennis players watch us with suspicion. Philip’s garden also yields new tennis balls for the dog. Quickly pocketed, before the lousy athletes spot them. Nature’s bounty. Happy dog. Silence bought with fluffy freebies.

Windfalls taxed.

This time last year I was picking up Philip’s windfall apples and mowing his lawn as he recovered from surgery. We watched the dog walkers and tennis players together as he recovered from surgery. Tennis is also seasonal - a burst of eager new players in Wimbledon fortnight. And a brief glut of lost balls if you have a dog with a nose for rubber. Philip died this year and his grass is now straggly and the hedge overgrown. We remember him through fruit. And tennis balls.

Along the sunken flinty path beyond the farm are yellow plums and pale wild cherries - mellow and beery, 2 out of 10 on the sweetness scale. Walking the dog is a fruity buffet, a strolling feast. One walk can yield five or six varieties. Spit out the bad bits and where the birds have pecked. Foxes and badgers are also mad for these cherries - stones a plenty in their morning poo. Pits scraped clean by badger guts.

Us versus the badgers for these bad boys.

The farm has the remains of a Roman villa alongside it (dug up twice in the 1960s and 2010s by county archaeologists², and then reburied), and I read that damson stones have been found in Roman archaeological digs across Britain. The name damson is thought to derive from ‘plum of Damascus’ though this type of fruit appears to only find favour in Britain.

Each fruit eaten is a reminder of how big sugar destroys nuance in human tastebuds. You have to work tongue and palate hard to explore the depths and range of the slightly sweet. To train for this moment you need to eschew the Mountain Dew and Irn Bru.

2025 is a good year for sloes, but they are at their worst now - pulsating purple and tempting, yet bite one and it bites back, furring the tongue. Sloes need frost to be on the margins of bearable. But biting into an unripe sloe has the strange benefit of making water taste wetter. So I keep biting them.

Sloes. Only good for making water wetter.

It’s a bad year for blackberries though - small, dry, miserable. Victims of a stop/start spring and summer. Plenty of elderberries, but only children and birds eat those. For adult tongues the subtle elder flowers taste far better. Elder flower pakoras and cordial in May.

Is eating someone else’s fruit theft? I think not if the picker keeps one foot on public land and you only pick to eat. We call it scrumping, though this originally referred to collecting unwanted shrivelled fruit³. My late Dad was both an apple grower and a scrumper of other people’s fruit - plums, pears, apples. Chasing kids out of his parents’ orchard⁴ whilst being the kid chased out by other growers.

I’m shameless - much fruit around here is left unpicked, so if I see a tree’s owner I say ‘I’m eating your fruit’ and consume the evidence. They - like the birds and the fox - can race me to it if they want. The wasps will take the hindmost.

It’s a good time for apples - round here mostly cooking apples - sour Bramleys on the floor, twisting ankles in the night. These relic trees are traces of the orchards that used to be here, alongside the railway, with damson trees planted along orchard edges to attract pollinators to apple trees within, and shield them from the cold wind.

We have a gnarled old apple tree of our own. We pick up our windfalls and take them to the sheep. July was hot and the meadow grass is just coming back after turning the colour of sand. In the modern way, the farmer appeals on Facebook for windfalls to give the flock something juicy to suck. Not too rotten though or the sheep get drunk.

I needed 3 hands to take this picture

Postscript: I meet Philip’s daughter who is clearing his house. I tell her I have been eating the damsons and taking tennis balls from his garden. ‘Good!’ she says. She tells me two bits of news: in her home village in the Cotswolds, her neighbours are out protesting against J.D. Vance, who is holidaying there. Even more importantly, she whispers, the blackberries in Pat and Peter’s garden are looking good. It may be their last blast - the house is for sale and I am fairly sure the buyers will get rid of the unruly bramble.

1. The varieties of free soft fruit are nearly as many as the varieties of Peter in our road. Tall Peter; French horn Peter; walnut Pete; the late Pat-and-Peter. And me, after 11 years still ‘new Peter’. Youngest by 20 years.

2. The second wave of diggers were amateur volunteers in the mid 2010s, and mostly retired older people. When our kids asked me what they were doing in that big hole every weekend I said that they are ancient Romans waking up from the earth and climbing out.

3. Scrump is ‘thought to come either from a dialectical term meaning ‘something shrivelled or withered’ (which probably comes from the Middle Dutch, schrimpen)’. It has a range of modern uses, some crude….

4. My grandparents in North Wales planted 17 trees in 1937 - we still have the nursery receipt. Five are still there, though decrepit. Four apples and a strange woody pear that needs boiling and pickling to be edible. All five are still fruiting though, despite the attention of the rams that rub their 80kg backsides on the trunks, peel the bark with their teeth, and eat the leaves that they can reach. Nearly ninety years old is pretty good going for an apple tree.