Laura O’Brien’s annual preparation of beach plum preserves involves a collection so secretive that she uses East End foragers who pick the wild fruit in places their grandparents revealed to them decades ago.

Not even O’Brien, who owns the food company Josephine’s Feast and sells the preserves through her website, is sure where her forager — whose name she won’t reveal — finds the beach plum shrubs throughout Sag Harbor, East Hampton and Amagansett. He won’t tell her.

"I have a third-generation forager, a gentleman who has been foraging in the wild with his grandmother. He said if he told me where the beach plums were, he’d have to kill me," she jokes.

Beach plums only grow wild on bushes in areas near saltwater such as Long Island’s East End, Cape Cod and a few other areas in the North

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