Cape Cod's Local Wild Jams and Jellies

 This trip to Cape Cod, we kept running into local jams and jellies.  Not just your typical tourist jams but real, homemade, from domestic and wild fruits both.  We finally succumbed.

Massachusetts is one of a handful of states that allows people to make jams and jellies in their homes and sell to the public.  Two of these places deserve mention.

On our trip to Chatham to try to see the sharks, we had a sweet surprise - the Chatham Jam and Jelly Shop and its free samples.  This website gies a bit of the history of jam/jelly making in Cape Cod.

The friendly owners had an array of open jars ready for the tasting, and we dug right in.  First to be sampled were beach plum jellies, both the red type and the rarer yellow beach plum.  We remember picking sand plums when living years ago in Kansas, and these were similar.  Wild plums, tart but tasty, these did not disappoint.

We expanded our tasting.  This shop makes various wild jams and jellies.  As they explain on their website:

"Locally picked fruits include: the native Wild Beach Plum, the Beach Rose, Garden Mint, Blueberries, Blackberries, Elderberries, Wine Raspberries, Peaches, Pears, Cranberries, Concord Grape, Wild Grape, Wild Cherry, and Tomatoes."

The Tomato and Basil jelly was delicious and unique but we finally settled

 on a jam called Friendship Jam, consisting of pineapple, wild beach plum juice, sugar and pectin.

The other jam and jelly place worth mentioning was the Green Briar Jam Kitchen in East Sandwich.  This kitchen featured solar cooked jams and jellies.  Honestly, if they had offered samples, we probably would have bought there too.  These jams have to be used quickly so we didn't buy much, but we will look out for these if we ever go back to Cape Cod.

Chatham Great White Sharks-Not! (Or, What we did on our Summer Vacation)

I just returned from Cape Cod this afternoon.  So, fresh off the digital camera....

 We did not plan to go to Chatham originally (where the great white sharks were spotted recently) but decided to go there-being spontaneous is part of vacationing, after all.  So yesterday, off we went.   Needless to say, we didn't see any sharks.   However I got some nice beach pictures and had a good time.

This picture is of the Chatham Lighthouse, near to where some sharks were spotted earlier in the week.  The only sharks there now are the visitors, circling the limited number of available parking spaces. (We may have been one of the "sharks" in this article.  Gee, my 15 seconds of fame.)  If we had been there the day before (Wednesday) we could have taken a tour of this working lighthouse.

What we did get to see is harbor seals.  The seals we saw were all in the water so I did not get a good photo. One of my tries is in the picture below, a dot between the posts in the "corner" and the boat closest to the bottom of the photo to the right. 

Their faces look very much like dogs.

We did not have time to take one of the tours that would have taken us out to nearby Monomoy Island, where we could have engaged in seal watching.  Perhaps another time.

Here are some boats in the Chatham harbor.

Finally, a picture taken at a beach at the Monomoy Wildlife Refuge.  This is another place we could have spent a lot more time at. 

Ironically, the movie "Jaws" was filmed not that far away (as the seabird flies), on the island of Martha's Vineyard.  So, I didn't need any convincing to stay out of the water!  Needless to say, the beaches above were all closed to swimmers - although it was cool and windy and probably few people would have been in the water anyway.

Next post, the sweeter side of Chatham.