Visions of plums dance in heads of Koke'e pickers
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Kaua'i Bureau
KOKE'E, Kaua'i — Cars full of kids, coolers and bamboo-handled picking poles are expected at dawn today for the opening day of Koke'e plum season.
Jan Tenbruggencate • The Honolulu Advertiser
This Kaua'i event has been a midsummer tradition for decades. It takes place in the chill air of Koke'e State Park, at elevations from 3,000 to 4,000 feet.
Hundreds of Kaua'i residents and visitors will gather plums from Koke'e, with or without permits.
Grandparents sit on buckets while kids scamper through the trees and adults snag the highest fruits with deft sweeps of the bamboo device used mainly to pick mangoes. Families fill buckets with the luscious fruit. The plums are purple when ripe, red when nearly ripe, and even if they have some green, they'll ripen at home.
If they last that long.
Some folks turn them into plum jam, and a few old-timers make the Japanese salty-sour preserve called ume, but most just eat them as is.
Koke'e's plums date to the early 1930s, when foresters hauled a few cuttings from Lihu'e, where they weren't growing well, to the upland forest of central Kaua'i. There, they did quite well.
The cuttings were from a South African variety called the Methley plum. There are scattered plantings in the uplands of other islands as well, but nowhere are they as populous as Kaua'i, where hundreds of trees were planted, usually close to roadways and trails. In Koke'e the plum trees produce their white blossoms in January and February, and the fruit ripens starting in late June.
The Division of State Parks normally opens the season, for which pickers are asked to pick up a free permit at the park headquarters, during the first week of July. This year it's a little early, in part because the crop started to ripen early.
"Fruiting on the island is a little strange this year," said Kaua'i state parks superintendent Wayne Souza. "Even if you look at the mango, they're flowering at different times. The plums this year are not ripening at the same time.
"It probably has something to do with the weather."
Furthermore, this year's crop is fairly sparse, compared with years when the plum trees get a glow like a Christmas tree festooned with red balls. The higher-elevation trees, closer to 4,000 feet, seemed to have more fruit than those at the lower range.
Many residents keep secret the routes to small groves of trees deep in the woods, and as of yesterday, it was clear that the word of early ripening had gotten out. Some folks had beaten the season. Pathways to familiar stands of plums were well-worn when a reporter inspected them yesterday. The ripest fruit had been picked from some trees.
One family yesterday had a couple of pounds of plums in a shopping bag, within a few yards of a sign that said a permit was required.
"We're not taking much," a woman said. "And we're going to be flying out before the season opens July 1."
Told that the season opens today, she looked embarrassed.
"Maybe we'll come back again and get a permit this time."
A permit allows pickers 5 pounds per person. Last year, 250 permits were issued, covering roughly 1,000 people. But there's no way to know how many unpermitted plum pickers there were.
Reach Jan TenBruggencate at jant@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808) 245-3074.
