Welch: Life on the wild side with plums from Texas thickets

Help. I’m being held captive by wild plums. It happens.

Yes, I picked them myself the last time we had a good crop of wild plums. I’m pretty sure it was 2021.

If you’ve ever braved the wild to gather your share, you know how much you treasure the fruit of your labor. Wasps, snakes, thorns, wild hogs, barbed wire fences, buffalo gnats, ticks — they’re all out to get you. I exaggerate. The buffalo gnats strike later. If you encounter a gnat, it’s a regular gnat.

We digress somewhat.

All my little bags of wild plums are dictating an important aspect of my life — refrigerator space. I would say freezer, but that term brings to mind a real freezer — not the never-big-enough upper space in a fridge that also keeps stuff frozen and is rightly called the freezer when it’s all you’ve got.

Yep, my husband said the plums had to go. They were taking up most of the space in our not-big-enough refrigerator freezer. He was right. He’s always right.

You’re wondering why I hadn’t already turned them into plum jelly? Yeah, me too. Really, that was the plan.

Yes, most people make jelly as soon as they pick the plums, but you can freeze ‘em and make jelly later, like in the middle of winter when heating up the kitchen is enjoyable. That I learned from my mother. I just never followed through with the jelly-making part.

Nope, I’ve never ever made plum jelly, summer or winter. But there’s always YouTube. I’d never put a starter on a tractor either.

So where are the plums now? I transported them in their little plastic freezer bags to one of our secondary refrigerators — the one in the secondary RV at the farm. The good news: It’s a fridge that pretty much freezes everything most of the time, meaning even the stuff in the non-freezer space. Fixing it is not an option. Trust me, you don’t want the whole story.

My husband almost never peers into that fridge. He seems to know better.

Anyway, here’s what can happen with wild plums if you keep them long enough and they stay frozen most of the time but not all of the time.

Plum brandy. At least I think it’s brandy. It’s intriguingly bubbly. By any other name, plum brandy is slivovitz.

My new plan is to drain the supposed slivovitz from all 20 or so bags. Then I can still make jelly at some point if I live long enough.

Don’t try this at home.

But is there not a daring Texas entrepreneur somewhere who’d like to make and market Texas wild plum brandy? If you’ve ever purchased a little jar of Texas plum jelly, you know Texas wild plums command top prices. Why not plum brandy?

In my artist’s mind I’m designing the labels already. Labels matter. It has to be a catchy design.

That’s how it is when you’re an artist. You never get the jelly made.

Hanaba Munn Welch sums up her weekly thoughts in exactly 501 words and dashes, a tribute to the old Fort Worth & Denver steam locomotive Engine 501 or Levi’s jeans. Take your pick. Farm life often inspires her writing.

This article originally appeared on Wichita Falls Times Record News: Welch: Plum wild