Our Story
The first time my Granny took me to the Salt Fork River to pick sand plums, I was around the age of 8. We took brown Braum's sacks to carry the plums in, of course. Braum's paper sacks are designed to hold two, full gallon jugs of milk, so they are meticulously folded and saved for projects such as these. I spent many young years eating her homemade sand plum jelly, but she was finally showing me the magic of how it was made.
One early July morning we drove down a highway and turned on several roads, stopping on the side of the road. Granny said she knew all the best sand-plum picking places, but made me swear to keep them a secret. Granny looked out, and squinted her eyes at the steep slope and then looked over at me with a grin, and said this was going to be a good year for sand plum-picking.
We trudged together through the sandy soil to the small prickly bushes where bright red pearls of succulent plums weighed down the tiny branches. Sand plum bushes don't produce every year, and they only grow wild she said. They grow in the sandy loam soil along the Salt Fork River. "Remember," she told me, "they are always ready right around the 4th of July." We picked for hours, each coin-sized plum dropping into the sack with a soft plunk.
This was only the first trip of dozens we took to pick sand plums together over the years. And every summer, I would learn more and more about her process. Find the plums. Pick the plums. Wash the plums. Lay them out. Then you wait, and can only mash them at the optimal time of ripening. Granny would have counters full of plums for weeks, and would meticulously pick out each ripe plum, mashing about one bowl of ripe plums once a day. Each day's harvest would then be frozen. Finally, once all the plums were processed, and we had accumulated several gallons of mashed plums, it was finally "Jelly-making Day," which was an all-day event that produced a year or more supply.
Jelly Making Day brought its own set of complexities. Special tools, special methods of sanitizing, cooking, and filling jars. Granny was a busy bee and had perfected just about every household art there was. She always made everything she did look effortless. I watched her with such intent, always trying to keep up and remember what she did exactly. I told her once many years later as a young mom, how frustrated I was that I wasn't any good at laundry or cooking, and how I envied her advanced skills. She looked at me, looked right into my soul, and smiled, "Honey, it took me 50 years to get this good."
It took me years of watching and asking her questions to fully understand her jelly-making processes. I watched, and learned, but it felt like I would always forget everything I had learned after an entire year had passed by, and then suddenly I had to re-remember what she taught me all over again. It took me ten years of our annual routine of picking, sorting, mashing, freezing, making, and canning alongside her to wrap my brain around it all.
I still make sand plum jelly, just like Granny taught me. I'm also a busy bee, like her. She showed me that some things take years to learn, and that's okay. With time, patience, and practice, the years teach us lessons that we don't even realize we are learning.
I grew up in a farm house surrounded by miles and miles of fields of crops. To get to any place where you might meet city folk required the use of a vehicle. When I sat on the east side of the house to watch the sunrise, or the west side to watch the sunset, all I could hear was everything and nothing at the same time. Only everything in this case was birds, bugs, leaves and wind and absolutely nothing else.
If you've ever sat outside for a long period of time in a place where you can't hear the sounds of cars, sirens or all the myriad of noises that humans create, you know what it means to hear the hum of the earth.
On those warm July evenings, my sisters and I would go outside to the field by our farm house and chase lightning bugs. We would laugh and play and run, in the warm, sticky summer air. But I remember stopping to listen to the buzzing cicadas, which would reach a fever pitch right at sundown. The symphony of sounds pulsing in waves from the trees those evenings felt like the very heartbeat of the universe.
Those childhood summer memories stick with me, and if I close my eyes I can still see the lightning bugs in the field again.
That is where Sandplum Patch comes from. Sand plums ripen wild in the sandy loam along the river, ready right around the 4th of July, and the best recipes — like Granny's jelly — are the ones passed down, made slowly, and remembered. This is a place to gather your recipes before they scroll away, keep the stories that come with them, and pass them on. Some things take years to learn, and that's okay.
There are so many more stories from the farm — the good years and the lean ones, the recipes and the people who made them. I'll be sharing them, along with what I've learned about canning, preserving, and cooking, over in the Journal.
Come gather your first recipe → · Read more in the Journal