Agarita Jelly: More than a Notion

Mary and Lewis took me to Austin on Saturday to visit Maverick’s dog, Chiugurh. I also got to check in with the chickens, though they hardly give me the time of day. You’d think they would be afraid of someone of the canine persuasion. But not these girls. Chiugurh and I roamed freely among them as they hunted and pecked about the back yard.

On Sunday morning, Mary completed a project that had begun a week before in Tarpley. While in the country, she and Maverick took a notion to harvest agarita berries. And as Mary’s mother used to say, it’s more than a notion deal with the agarita bush. That’s because its leaves are spiny like holly and the berries are not much larger than B-Bs.

Now there’s some clueless dude on the Internet that talks about picking the berries one by one. But the time-honored method, passed down by Mary’s grandmother Maverick, entails spreading an old bed sheet on the ground and beating the branches. (Several years ago, a guest introduced her upside down umbrella method, but it didn’t take.)

Despite the difficulty of maneuvering the sheet (or in this case a throwaway plastic tablecloth) under the low-lying branches, the harvest went fairly smoothly. But that was just the beginning. The toughest, most time consuming part of the procedure entails separating the berries from the twigs, leaves and sundry insects that have also fallen onto the sheet.

Mary took it in stages, floating the berries in a pan of water, removing detritus and draining. After repeating the process several times, she brought it home and did it again. And again. Once the berries were more or less all that was left, she boiled them and strained out the juice.

The easy part came yesterday in Austin: matching the juice cup-for-cup with sugar, adding pectin and a dash of lemon juice, and boiling briefly. The yield was only two and a half small jars and I was never offered any. But I’m guessing that agarita jelly must be heavenly since they’re already talking about going through the hellish process again.

Which is fine with me because while they wrestle with sheets, sticks and pans of water, I can run leash-free in the country with my buddy Chigurh. Life doesn’t get much better than that.