The first plum pick of the year always marks the start of the “proper” foraging season for us. The timing of that first harvest sets in motion trips to Evesham over the course of several weeks as we pick different plum varieties at various stages of ripeness.
Growing our business whilst staying true to our ethos of picking fruit from old orchards and hedgerows has always been challenging. As we grow and the stakes become higher with bigger volumes to pick and orders of our plum jams to fulfill we have become reliant on a network of trusted contacts who give us vital information on when to pick certain orchards.
Gary runs the Vale Heritage Trust, which looks after many old plum orchards around Evesham, and Colin, who was the last farmer to properly farm many of those orchards, are vital for us to time our picking trips - giving us important information that lets us plan our production calendar. This information is becoming ever more important as the effects of climate change are having a huge impact on the timeframe of these crops ripening, with erratic differences between different years.
In the hot years of 2018 and especially the first year of the pandemic in 2020, the harvest came very early due to prolonged hot weather in Spring and Summer. This year the plums came early again, but this time it was due to a very mild Winter that meant most fruit trees blossomed around two weeks earlier than usual.
The harvest this year has been the worst that we have known, usually a poor plum harvest can be put down to late frosts in Spring when the trees are in blossom. This year there were no frosts, just endless rain for weeks on end during Spring, that meant that bees simply couldn’t fly to pollinate the blossom.
Another friend of ours, Billy Auger, in South Shropshire found that his gooseberries, that most reliable and hardy English crop, had a shocking year yielding less than a quarter of what he would usually expect. He’s convinced this was also due to the wet Spring. As climate change makes all our seasons wetter it seems this year could be a worrying sign of things to come.