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.

[sartorias]

That is one tall tree!

[conuly]

The mulberries are all done here :(

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

[pameladean]

That mulberry is just glorious! P.

[anna_wing]

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

[cmcmck]

That is an impressive mulberry!

[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...).

[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.

[adore]

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

[mallorys_camera]

Is that the mulberry tree you showed me?

It is such a beautiful tree!

[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.

[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.

[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!

[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.

[wyld_dandelyon]

We have mulberry trees too!

[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

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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.