When you mention sugar plums, the first thing that pops into most people's minds is Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from The Nutcracker, or the poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas” by Clement Moore and the line “While visions of sugar plums danced in their heads.” If you mention edible sugar plums, people think of the hard candy known as sugar plums, made by boiling dried fruit (not necessarily plums) with sugar. Few people think of the fruit sugar plums first. I'm lucky enough to have an old mature sugar plum, also known as a Moyer plum tree (Prunus domestica) growing in my yard.
Sugar plums are oval-shaped plums with purple skins and yellow flesh. They can be eaten fresh or dried. Moyer plums have a very high sugar content when ripe, hence the name sugar plums. You can tell they are ripe when they are soft to the touch.
Mature Moyer plum trees grow ten to twelve feet tall. The trees are self-fruiting but more productive when cross-pollinated with another European plum tree. They bear white blossoms in the spring.
