A Plum Job

The Autumn Equinox/Mabon ‘spoke’ on the Wheel of the Year has rolled around once again and I’ve been busy washing, slicing, de-stoning, and stewing plums. The funny thing was, when my husband came home with a HUGE box of plums after visiting his parents and extended family on a farm in Goulburn, it didn’t even occur to me that it was nearly Mabon and that preserving fruit etc from this autumn harvest time was a “very Mabon thing to do”. All I could see was a mountain of hard work to add to all the other stuff I already had waiting, but I pretended to be pleased at the prospect of working my way through all 10kg of this plum job. 😉

I really need to get outside more and spend less time here at my computer, and less time inside the house in general, as sometimes I feel a little disconnected from the Earth and the seasons, and even lose track of what moon phase we’re in at the moment. Life just seems too busy, with never enough time to just stop and “smell the roses” (or prune them, which is why I have rose trees in my overgrown garden now). Anyway, after the Mabon/plum connection finally dawned on me I felt a bit happier about the time I was to spend in the kitchen as at least now I could con myself into enjoying it more by looking at it in slightly more “Pagan” terms of reconnecting with the seasons, instead of just boring, tedious work …well, that was the plan.

I decided also that I might as well go “all out” and document this momentous occasion, as it has been quite a few years since I last cooked the fruits of a huge home harvest like this one, hence the pretty pictures from the photo session I had with the plums. A few of the plums are shown above in a fruit bowl lovingly handcrafted for me by my grandfather many years ago. 😀

Somehow over time I’ve lost interest in my own veggie garden, although my husband has now rekindled his interest in it so it is not languishing. Like my grandparents before me, I used to grow veggies and make jams, pickles and stew homegrown fruits according to the seasons. But in more recent times I seem to be spending my life at the computer instead …comes with being a “web master” or “website manager” I guess. At least I can always Google to see what season or moon phase it is, lol.

I wasn’t able to cook all the plums at once so the first 5kg batch were cooked in my biggest saucepan and turned into jam. Well, kind of …the jam didn’t set properly, so I added guar gum to help it along, but that went lumpy in every wrong way possible so then I had to “fix” it with a stick blender, lol. It’s very smoooooooth but yum, and is also good on icecream. The second 5kg batch were cooked for a shorter time so they can be used as dessert fruit, over cereals for breakfast or just enjoyed on their own. Of course we ate quite a few of the plums raw as well, but the huge haul of ripe fruit wasn’t going to last very long so cooking and preserving was the only option, which of course is what you would expect at Mabon.

Bon appetit! 😀