mulberries

[asakiyume]

The two berries I used to pick and eat as a kid were mulberries and black raspberries (a different fruit from blackberries--we had no blackberries where I grew up but plenty of black raspberries). Black raspberries grow on prickly canes, and you can find them in abandoned lots and beside railroad tracks. I was a pro at finding places to pick them.

Mulberries grow on trees. When I was a kid, there was a copse of three or so sapling-sized mulberry trees on my street, at the edge of someone's property, and we used to walk by them and pick the berries off. Not as flavorful as black raspberries, but pleasantly sweet.

Now all but one of those mulberry trees is gone, but that one tree! It's huge. The berries are waaaay up high, out of reach, but I saw a mourning dove enjoying them. And they fall from those high, high branches down to the street.

grand mulberry tree



mulberries



These berries, though, come from a different tree, across the way. You can see below that the berries on this tree are more in reach ;-) (I don't recall this tree from when I was a kid--I think we just preferred being on the other side of the street for our collecting.)

the tree across the way

Comments

[cgbookcat1]

I love black raspberries and planted some in my yard! Birds get most of them but the couple handfuls I get are wonderful.

[asakiyume]

I love them too ^_^

[sartorias]

That is one tall tree!

[asakiyume]

And if you click through, you can get click to enlarge twice, which gives you the experience of being a squirrel or bird way up among those branches!

[conuly]

The mulberries are all done here :(

Do you have any white mulberries where you live, or just the red ones?

[asakiyume]

I have *seen* white mulberries, but I don't remember where I saw the tree. I grew up outside Albany, NY, and now live in western Massachusetts, so one of those two places--but which one! Not sure...

Do you have white mulberries near you?

[pameladean]

That mulberry is just glorious! P.

[asakiyume]

It sure is! Aging for a tree means becoming magnificent ^_^

[anna_wing]

I've never knowingly had black raspberries! Mulberries and blackberries, yes. That is a beautiful tree.

[asakiyume]

I hope one day you can try some! They are smaller than blackberries. They have their own unique flavor--not like a red raspberry (or a golden one) and not like a blackberry.

Where I live now, there are both blackberries and black raspberries. The black raspberries begin to ripen about now in a typical year, and the blackberries come ripe in August. When we moved here was my first time to experience wild blackberries!

[cmcmck]

That is an impressive mulberry!

[asakiyume]

It's fun to see how tall a tree can actually get! It's a far cry from "all around the mulberry bush"!

[shewhomust]

I lived in a house with a nulberry tree in the garden, when I was a child. It gave abundant fruit, which my mother used to bottle for the winter (we grew very tired of mulberries, imagine!). My father would sit in the shade of the tree playing chess, and occasionally a mulberry would fall onto the board (and once a cat, but that's another story...).

[asakiyume]

Ahahaha, that's a great story, both about the mulberries dropping on the board (like the tree giving hints about moves) and even better about the cat!

(But yes, I can imagine getting tired of it--anything over and over again can be Too Much.)

[smokingboot]

Blackberries are my favourite breakfast fruit. I used to come home from late night shifts, pick some from the wilderness that constituted our garden, and have them on some pre-dawn breakfast cereal.

I never tasted a mulberry or a black raspberry in my life, but they both sound enticing.

[asakiyume]

Blackberries are wonderful! I think I first had them in, actually, England! And I can remember picking them along the coastline in Dorset (which is where we lived at the time).

I'm lucky that where I live now, there are both wild blackberries *and* wild black raspberries--though the place I used to go to pick blackberries has gotten too wild (which is to say, too full of poison ivy) for me to venture it.

Here's hoping one day you get to try both mulberries and black raspberries!

[adore]

What a beautiful tree. And the berries look delicious :)

[asakiyume]

They don't have a very strong flavor--they're just kind of mild and sweet--but mild and sweet is sometimes just the ticket!

[mallorys_camera]

Is that the mulberry tree you showed me?

It is such a beautiful tree!

[asakiyume]

I think it must be! I was so taken by how big it had gotten!

[osprey_archer]

I pick mulberries sometimes! As you say, not as flavorful as raspberries, but it does make me feel like a forager.

Last year one of my friends pointed out a series of serviceberry trees to me, and now when they're ripe I like to eat a few just because I know I can.

[asakiyume]

Yes! Sometimes a foraged food isn't much to write home about--except for the fact that you can just reach out and eat it, which is like a bonus twenty points added to an unremarkable essay. Suddenly it's earned a grade of 95%

[amaebi]

I liked mulberries a lot as a child, and was shocked when I learned that adults consider them insipid. (Now, I do think that white mulberries are insipid compared with black ones.) We had a big mulberry tree in our yard and I used to love climbing it, often with a book and accompanied by our cat Aristotle. It was fantastic when it was windy.

Of course, I knew about adults unhappy with the berry stains and bird feces concomitant to mulberries from early on.

We had black raspberries and blackberries in our yard and neighborhood. Bliss. The large humped blackberries were also major butterfly Mecca, en route to the milkweed field.

[asakiyume]

Black raspberries, blackberries, and mulberries! Paradise! Sitting in the welcoming branches of a big (and fruit bearing!) tree, reading--double paradise ^_^

(also I love that your cat was named Aristotle... a true sage)

[rebeccmeister]

Part of our routine in the mornings when we go rowing is to clean off our docks of all of the accumulated goose poop. It's always funny when we reach mulberry season - the poop goes from green to purple!

My partner S loves them. I think I may have found a good tree where he can pick them the next time he's in town during mullberry season.

One of these days, in my copious free time (ha!), I'd love to go pick black raspberries. From what I understand, there's a bunch along the bike path between Albany and Delmar. In the meantime I have some red raspberries in my small backyard garden plot. Yum!

[asakiyume]

Albany and Delmar! Wait--have we talked about this?! Delmar is where I grew up! I was on that bike path just this weekend! (well actually, the one from New Scotland to Delmar)

[threemeninaboat]

I have a mulberry tree :)
This drug website on the internet said that if you eat a bunch of little mulberry leaves you'll get very high. I ate mulberry leaves all day and that did not happen. The internet lied to me.

[asakiyume]

HOW could the internet lie! I am shocked!

... and disappointed. I'd love to know that a free high was as nearby as a mulberry tree.

[wyld_dandelyon]

We have mulberry trees too!

[asakiyume]

Hurray! Very happy to hear about tree-berry goodness elsewhere. Do you enjoy eating them? (... by which I mean the berries; I'm guessing you're not chowing down on the whole trees!)

[wayfaringwordhack]

Mulberries were the berries of my childhood. Many years ago, I shocked my MIL eating some off the tree across the street from her house. "What are you doing!? You are going to poison yourself! You don't know what those are." Um, yes, I do. :D

[asakiyume]

Hahahaha, excellent! And now she knows a part of her landscape she can eat ;-)

[queenoftheskies]

We used to pick regular blackberries at the park when I was a kid, but OMG, the chiggers were awful around those bushes.

My grandparents had gooseberries. Have you ever had those?

[asakiyume]

I had gooseberries when we lived in England! And in my yard I have red currants, which are in the gooseberry family.

[noachoc]

When I bought the house, one of the things I wanted was a mulberry tree. I finally bought one. It's only three feet tall (and I got exactly one mulberry off of it last summer) but someday I hope it's huge.

[asakiyume]

Someday it will be--just you wait! We planted an apple tree I'd grown from a seed and an oak tree we'd grown from an acorn when we moved into this house in 1999. Now they're both HUGE. ... Admittedly, that's over 20 years (but not much over), but the time does keep going by!

[athenais]

I've never eaten a mulberry. They're not at all common here. I don't think the coastal region is good for them, although I'm sure someone, somewhere has grown them in their garden in the warmer parts.

[asakiyume]

That's interesting: I would have thought they'd grow okay in your area--I mean, in the Northeast the winters are colder! But plants are picky: they may want something else they can't get in the SF area (... which is where you are?) Or it could be your area has too much of something they don't like. Who knows!

[orange_scissors]

They are easy to root - just cut off a small, thin branch and stick in soil. I have some that I rooted about 4 months ago and they are about 1 meter tall. They'll produce berries in a few months. In Laos, would be in Feb. but not sure about growing in the US.

[asakiyume]

Wow, okay, I will try! My husband will be happy for this news too.