Are These Plums?

Hi folks,

I was trimming the Amazonian jungle encroaching from my neighbour's garden into mine when these caught my eye. (See image.) Are they plums? If not, what else could they be?

 

Look like plums to me.

 

I think they are sloes (wild damsons). Make excellent sloe gin!

 

They look too big for sloes, those are little round things and the tree they grow is seriously thorny. These might be bullaces or damsons. You can use them in the same way as sloes to make sloe gin, but it's very hard to get them through the gin bottle neck!

 

They're too big for damsons (plenty of ripe ones around here now) and definitely too big for sloes.
Maybe bullace, but most likely plums - especially as it seems to be from a tree in your neighbour's garden.

 

i think damsons are just wild plums (and plums domesticated damsons)

all the wild uh plums? near us look like domesticated ones just with bad growth habits (eg. intense suckering). sloes however look totally different. theyre smaller and more like a big scraggly bush than a tree

 

Sloes are the fruits of the Blackthorn. Blackthorn is so called because of the dark bark and the vicious thorns, the wood is hard and has been used in walking sticks, flowers a bit after the plums, it also suckers with abandon.
It is a useful hedging plant and can be used with hawthorns to make stockproof hedge.
Blackthorn was linked to witches, fairies and sacred to the Celts. It is supposed to be bad luck to cut one down or prune it without a suitable offering to the fairies.
This year there are very few sloes or damsons in the hedges near me, so no sloe gin this year.

 

I went down a rabbit hole trying to decide what we had in our garden- plums, damsons, bullace - when we first moved here when the fruit was just appearing and ripening. My memory is that it’s that there are no categorical differences between the categories with many local variations as to which get which name between damsons, wild plums and bullace.

We have a damson tree and the fruits are usually around 1.5-2.5cm long and about as fat as an index finger, maybe just over a cm diameter. Very, very sharp but make a fabulous jam but very little flesh on each fruit so takes the patience of a saint (or a really good lengthy radio play/audio book)to fish out all the stones.

 

Just to add, our damsons aren’t ripe yet. Fully formed but hard as nails, probably need a couple more weeks or some consistent warm weather

 

They look like plums to me and are problem from the czar cultivar as it's a very common plum that's far darker than the other common, Victoria, cultivar.
Some of our victoria plums were picked yesterday because they are ready.

 

Just had a walk with my pooch and picked some sloes and what I think are bullace.
Sloes on the left, Bullace on the right - neither are ripe just yet.

For many years I'd assumed the fruits on the right were damsons and when I've see people picking them they also think they're damsons, but having had a Google I now think they look more like Bullace as they are round and not oval. There are lots of bushes of both around the fields.

 

Not at all like my damsons @Pete8 which are definitely more oval although that’s assuming they are what I think they are

 

I'm pretty sure they're bullaces on the right of my photo. Definitely sloes on the left - I've made gin with them years ago which is rather too nice
There are plenty of bushes around the fields at the end of my road and I often see people picking them. My dog needs to greet every human she comes across so I'm always chatting and all the pickers I speak with think they're damsons and they make lovely wine or jam, but as you say, damsons are more oval, these are round, so I guess they're bullaces.
I'll have a closer look tomorrow and see if I can find any oval fruits hanging from branches anywhere.

 

Whichever they are, they are excellent when pickled in white malt vinegar !

 

"Generally Damsons are more elongated than Bullaces, which are usually round and Damsons are slightly less tart". Both are varieties of the domestic plum Prunus domestica, while sloes are, appropriately, Prunus spinosa.