The Cottage Smallholder

I've made some of what I call wild plum jam this year, and stewed some for mixing with yoghurt.

Ditto for what I call wild damson jam and stewed, which I differentiate from wild plums on the grounds that they taste like shop damsons, and are as sweet.

I looked into this a year or so ago - there might be old threads here about it - and what I discovered is that plum trees grow true from shoots, but not from seeds. Grafting too, I should think.

I've found over the last few years a whole load of trees with what I call wild plums in pembrokeshire, and, like blackberries and hedgerow apples, there is a wide degree of difference in bitterness, other taste cues, and the time at which they become ripe.

There are various claims of variety of blackberry, running into hundreds, though actually I suspect more - almost infinite.

My view is that the same thing can be said of wild plums. Certainly there is a helluva lot of variation in taste, size, bitterness, timing.

Getting to know which are the best ones for your purposes is a matter of experience. Some of the ones I use for jam are quite bitter, which gives the jam, I think, more depth of taste.

I have no garden, but if I did I wouldn't try to grow any plum from seed. If one could extract a shoot (is that legal?) from a good tree, then I'd think that would be the way to go.

David