Another plum fatality...

Well, the weather's certainly been full-on over the last couple of days.  And it's probably the cause of the death of the other half of the plum tree (the first half fell over quite a while ago...)
I'm pretty sure it was still in the right place on Saturday evening, when we got back from our holiday, but this morning, I found it like this:

This is saddening, as it means one less fruit tree from which to gather fruit.  However, it did make picking the plums a bit easier, as they were all at ground level.  We picked all the plums, and will make them into jam as soon as the requisite time presents itself. 

We also tried to clear as much of it as possible, so that we could take the chainsaw to it for firewood.  Big Boy came out to help today and was, genuinely, extremely helpful.  We worked away with secateurs, a pruning saw and a mini axe and actually made a lot of progress.  Some of the stuff cleared will go on the compost heap, the rest will be taken away to a bigger compost heap elsewhere!
When we started, it looked like this:

And we chopped and hacked and cut:

And chopped, hacked and cut some more:

And once the tree was thus cleared, we discovered it had a very enjoyable use:

And yes, that's the plums you see there in the box :)  Plum jam on its way.