Plum Assignment

The other day my brother, Tom, sent a photo of his daughters—my nieces—that brought a funny story to mind. Millie (10) and Jessie (8) live in Launceston, Tasmania, where February is the height of the summertime growing season, and the girls were running a plum and apple juice racket off of a card table in front of their house. Tasmania, which is sometimes known as “The Apple Isle,” is great at growing tree fruit, and from an ancient tree in their backyard the girls had picked enough apples to press gallons of juice, which they were flogging paper cups of for $1 apiece. This wasn’t surprising. Tom is an enterprising home gardener, cook, forager and fisherman who grows heirloom vegetables, brews beer, distills his own gin, and once spent all winter building a huge backyard smokehouse for smoking salmon, only to burn down his own shed. I don’t know how central a role Millie and Jessie actually played in pressing the apple juice for their fruit stand, but I suspect Tom’s was the hand behind the curtain. 

While apple juice was selling well, the sleeper hit at the girls’ fruit stand was greengage plums. Even in Tasmania, where you can grow just about anything, greengages are special. They are small, emerald green plums that ripen in February, and Millie and Jessie’s backyard has a tree from which they fall like rain. Plump, tart, and perfectly sweet, these things are to die for. It’s too easy to eat them by the bucketful—a mistake those unfamiliar with the impact half a bucket of ripe plums has on the digestive system make at their peril. Last year I learned this while visiting Tom’s family at the peak of greengage season. A leafy, hilly city, Launceston is highly walkable, and I enjoyed walking my nieces to and from school each day. Each morning Millie, Jessie, Daisy the border collie, and I would ramble through quiet residential streets, then cross a single, busy-ish road to reach their school. Being in a school zone, that busy-ish road featured an Australian icon—the lollipop man. The lollipop man or lady is a (usually elderly) town employee tasked with ensuring that kids (and their attendant parents, dogs, and/or uncles) safely cross busy streets on their way to school. Approach a designated crosswalk at the beginning or end of a school day holding the hand of an eight-year-old and you’ll be bailed up by a cheery senior citizen decked in high-visibility safety clothing and clutching a seven-foot pole with a “STOP” sign on top (the eponymous ‘lollipop’). Then this knight-in-shining-neon will march into the road brandishing said lollipop, bringing traffic to a halt so everyone crosses safely. The job requirements are clear: a cheery disposition, an ability to command obedience from motorists, and crucially, an unswerving commitment to being at one’s post for the hour coinciding with the start and end of each school day. 

While it doesn’t pay much, the job of the lollipop man or lady is not without benefits, among which is the opportunity to serve as a good shepherd to the little kids you help each day. As a result, the friendly lollipop man often finds himself showered with gifts. Plum season is no exception. One morning during my visit, Millie and Jessie filled a grocery store bag with ripe greengages to give to their teachers. As we approached the crosswalk, the lollipop man’s customary smile faded when he realized what was in the bag Jessie was proffering. “Ohhhh, no! Not those again!” he cried, backing away. Apparently, one morning the previous week the girls had left a grocery bag full of greengages with the lollipop man, who, not having encountered them before, proceeded to eat the whole bag. By the time school let out that afternoon the effects were making themselves urgently apparent, and as the girls and their dad approached the crosswalk, the lollipop man recognized both the source of his distress, and a solution. With a cry of “Hold this!” he thrust his STOP sign and high-viz cap into my brother’s hands and ran wildly in the direction of the school restrooms, leaving Tom seeing other people’s kids across the street and the girls contemplating a change in their greengage distribution strategy. 

The moral of the story? Share your harvest widely. This month’s Gardening issue, with its crop of stories about seed savers, sustainable gardening practices, and small farmers joining forces in the face of climate change, is our effort to do that. We hope its stories will inspire you to get outside, dig in the dirt, and dream of big harvests to come. Happy spring.