Last Prunes

I noticed the prunes from a tree in front of the house were nice and ripe, so I plucked the few I could reach. To do this I use my home-made picking device, made from the bottom of a plastic bottle and attached to a long metal strip left over from something in the garage (which replaced a rather ugly extending curtain rod that had longer reach but has disappeared in the past).

The bottle base has slots cut in the sides, which allow a prune to be caught with its stem in the slot and then pulled off the branch. Works fine though a few do bounce back out and need to be found on the ground. My harvest was eight prunes in all; the only ones I could reach from the balcony. In the past we'd get dozens, also from the tree that's now gone, and the missus would make jam from them. These eight prunes we ate as such and were delicious.

prune - pruneau - pruim