While I was cleaning up the forest garden, I decided to bite the bullet and rip out the Methley plum I've been babying for the last four-and-a-half years.  Several people have sung the praises of their European plum trees in the last year, telling me how much the trees produced with little care, and I figured I'd obviously just chosen the wrong species by going for an Asian plum. 

Since the two new European plums I installed last winter --- Seneca and Imperial Epineuse --- have already grown considerably more than the Methley ever did, I suspect my gut reaction was right and I should have been more hard-hearted sooner.  In fact, I was able to literally rip the Methley plum out of the ground bare-handed, a sure sign that it was lingering, not growing, in our soil.

Now I just need to wait another three to five years for these better plum varieties to produce.  It's a bit easier to be patient now that other fruit trees on our homestead are starting to bear...but not much.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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