Plum Pickins

The state of Kansas is well known for its Sandhill Plums. Okay, maybe the only people who know about the plums are Kansans or those related to a Kansan. So I guess that wouldn’t really make them ‘well known’ by anyone other than us. The point being that there are these plums that are unique to the hills of Kansas. They grow on thorny bushes in the ditches or in fields and are super tart to taste. Now that my out-of-stater’s are up to speed…

I remember my grandmother having Sand Plum Jelly on the farm. My grandfather told me that she made it every year that there were plums. I don’t really like jelly and can’t distinctly remember ever tasting Sand Plum Jelly before, but I decided that this would be a wonderful opportunity to make jelly for the first time! My mother-in-law and mother and myself (none of which were avid jelly producers) got together and made some jelly last week. I have to say it was a lot of work, but with 3 of us it was manageable. Tacy (mother-in-law) did the hardest part of picking the plums ahead of time. We had 3 gallons to work with and no idea how much juice this would make. We washed them and got rid of the bad plums. Then boiled them to extract the beautiful pinkish reddish juice. Of course it was over 100 degrees that day and soooo hot in the kitchen. After that we used a nifty metal “seeder” (I don’t really know the technical name) that they used back in the day. This allowed us to squeeze every ounce of juice and pulp out of the plums and leave the seeds and skins inside the metal cone. Then there was the discussion of how much sugar to add. Side note – if you are a jelly lover, then there is a reason that the serving size is 1 tablespoon. We used 11 POUNDS of sugar! After sampling the juice (I thought there was no way that it could really be tart enough to need that much sugar) we determined that it really needed that much sugar. So we cooked up the juice, sugar, and pectin – and poured our jars of jelly. For not really knowing what we were doing or if it was going to be any good, we sort of went all out. We ended up with 39 jars of jelly! Since the going rate is $5 a jar, I figure we can sell them 2 for 1 since it is our rookie batch. We will collect some feedback and jack the price up next year based on "overwhelming popularity".