By Katherine Kelly -- Copyright 2007

           When my husband and I were both children, our parents knew where the wild plum thickets could be found around Lubbock, Texas. Our families did not know each other, but they traveled the same roads so they both knew where to find the wild plums early each summer.

            One wild plum thicket used to be in the area of Silver Falls State Park outside of Crosbyton, Texas, but it was destroyed when they put in the dam and redirected the highway. Another was somewhere in the area of Buffalo Lakes, but I have not been able to find it since I grew up-it probably disappeared when they developed Lake Ransom Canyon, Texas. Another thicket was west of Paducah, Texas, and it is still there.

            The whole family would go when it was time to pick the wild plums, then mother would make wild plum jelly. Sure-Jell® (powdered fruit pectin) has been around since it was developed by the Fairport Vinegar Works, probably in the late 19^th century, but we didn't usually have any because it was a cost Mother could do without. Mother would wash the wild plums, put them in a heavy pot and cover them with water and boil them for about 30 minutes. Then she would run the cooked plums through a colander, drain the juice, and mash out the pulp. The plum pits and skin were thrown away. She would add lots of sugar (about 4 ½ cups of juice and 3 cups of sugar) to the juice and pulp in the heavy pot and return it to the stove to boil until a drop would hang onto the spoon. That's how you knew the jelly was ready, and you usually had only half as much as you started with.

            Making jelly this way is not an exact science and sometimes what you get are several jars of plum syrup for your pancakes. But that's good, too. The jelly would be poured into fruit jars while it was very hot, and sealed with lids. Sometimes we didn't have new lids and had to use old ones. In that case, Mother would melt paraffin (wax) and put it on top of the jelly before she put the old lid on the jar. If a little mold did develop on top of the jelly, she would just scoop off the top layer and throw that away; the rest of the jar of jelly would still be good.

            On June 28, 2007, my husband, Thomas, and I traveled to Yukon, Oklahoma, to visit our son and his family. Thomas knew just where the wild plum thicket near Paducah, Texas was, so we stopped and picked a few of the bright red plums, and I made a really small batch of jelly the old-fashioned way on Saturday. It could have used a little more sugar, but it was good. On our way back home on July 1, we stopped at the thicket again and picked many more wild plums.

            By Tuesday, both Thomas and I were breaking out in a rash of large red spots. We didn't know what caused the rash, but our guess was that we got into poison ivy, poison oak or poison sumac at the wild plum thicket. The itch was really awful and it hurt. We broke out in new red spots for days. I made five jars of jelly out of the wild plums we picked, though, I'm not sure they were worth the misery we went through with that rash.