Doom & Mulberries

Propagating hope on the edge between scarcity and abundance

We’ve been down in the bottomlands a bit this past week, transplanting pecan and hickory into dry earth. We work down here in the afternoon, when the air is hot but the western sun is partly blocked by hulking sycamores and nodding, twisted limbs of Osage orange. An investment of sorts is being made here, down among the waist-high Reed’s canary grass, the borer-killed ash, and the hordes of questing ticks, laying in wait. To plant a tree is to hope, and to plant a tree that won’t bear for two decades is, well, let’s just say optimistic, in a month with no rain, when the sun only yields to a haze of Canadian brimstone.

The skies of the eastern United States are acrid with smoke; the results of nearly 10.6 million acres burning (as of this draft, it was 4 million when I started this piece). The inhabitants of places like Wall Street or the Capitol might even be able to notice that the world is burning and the flames of hell are licking at their front door, but probably not. They may just prefer to continue to make it an issue that will be solved by individual consumer choice. They have hands to kiss, babies to shake, and money to make. Siberia is sweltering under an all-time record-breaking wave of searing heat. The journal Nature Communications has just released a study stating that we’ve missed the boat on maintaining Arctic sea ice in summer months, as in, it will be gone one day, and it isn’t coming back. 

So we are here, with ticks crawling up our legs, planting pecans and hickories in hopes that they’ll provide something to someone in a parched and iceless future. As much as I want to be here for their first masting, perhaps it’s better not to contemplate the world a quarter century from now. Stop thinking about planting trees for the future, get a little selfish, and take what they’ll give me in the present. I will pick mulberries, while they’re here, today.

The mulberry is a wonderful tree, which may bear wonderful fruit. Here in the Midwest, we have two, maybe two and a half types of mulberry. Our native mulberry, Morus rubra, or the Red Mulberry, is less common than it once was. Morus alba, the White Mulberry, was brought to North America by colonists to develop a domestic silk industry. I don’t think it ever really caught on, but the white and red mulberries readily interbreed to produce a hybrid, which really ought to be called a Pink Mulberry, but unfortunately, I’m not in charge of scientific classifications. Elsewhere in the world there is the black, or Pakistani mulberry, but our climate doesn’t support them here. Yet. None of the classifications, red, black, or white, necessarily have bearing on the actual color of the ripe fruits. Most mulberries ripen to a deep maroon, some of them a pale gold tinged with lavender. Eat too many unripe mulberries, and you will get a bellyache. Take it from a guy who will try anything, repeatedly.

Sometimes mulberry fruits taste very good. Sometimes, they taste insipid, with a hint of dirt. The mulberry is dioecious, that is, individuals will have male or female reproductive organs. The females produce fruit and the males produce pollen, or for some people, allergies. They both have leaves that are extremely rich in protein, and palatable to animals and less picky humans. They are the only food of the silkworm, which uses the protein packed leaves to produce the valuable commodity that is silk. In fact, all mulberries, but particularly those of the alba variety which have been selected for silkworm feed production readily coppice. A coppicing tree is one which can be repeatedly cut to stimulate vivacious branch growth, like the mythological Hydra. In certain climates and growing conditions, the act of coppicing (cutting down to the base) or pollarding (cutting back a bit higher on the trunk) can be performed more than once a year, to maximize the leaf mass that can be harvested in a given area. Here in the Midwest, I tend to coppice or pollard mulberries every other year, but I’m soft on trees.

In addition to coppicing mulberries for leaf harvest, the leaves can simply be stripped from the branches by hand. There is probably a level to which this can be mechanized, in a monoculture setting. In fact, there are some moriculture oriented cultivars (moriculture = the cultivation of mulberries for silkworm fodder) selected for easily stripping leaves. I’ve experimented a bit with leaf stripping on my own, pulling down along the stems into a bucket, and then incorporating the fresh green leaves into goat, pig and poultry feed. An experiment with producing and preserving a mulberry leaf meal for year round feeding is on my long list of things I’ll try some time.

Fruit from the selected cultivar “Silk Hope” is much larger and sweeter than most of the wild types around here.

A likely more popular feature for most readers, however, may be the fruit. Now, some folks are not fond of the fruit, for aesthetic and cleanliness purposes. It is messy, and overhanging fruit laden branches, replete with feasting birds, can be the bane of existence for that strange class of people who like to keep their sidewalks clean. The dark blue anthocyanins of the mulberry can be carried far and wide within the digestive tract of birds and deposited anywhere beneath where they like to congregate. The purple stains are water soluble, but it's also true that it doesn’t rain anymore. Personally, I am filled with a rare, pure joy at the thought of fat purple sparrow droppings splatting upon the immaculate driveways, vehicles, and heads of those who might disparage this tree for its untidiness. O berry-filled birds of suburbia, take flight and dispense your glistening jewels upon the properties of that kempt and antiseptic class!

The fruit drops when it is dead ripe. The first sign of mulberry season in your area may well be the purplish leavings of ‘possums, raccoons, and other opportunistic climbers. As a very delicate berry, they often fall with a hearty splat, rendering some unsuitable for harvest. We have a technique here for harvesting and processing berries that I would like to share with y’all. 

It begins with a large crook, which you can manufacture yourself, or find while walking around looking for the right stick. The hook end of the crook (make it 8-10 long at least) can be padded to protect the bark of the tree. We then take a dedicated sheet, stapled between two sticks. This sheet can be placed beneath the limbs you wish to shake if you are working solo, or held aloft, nearer the branch by helpers so that the fruit needn’t fall so far. Now this part isn’t rocket surgery: you shake the branch with the crook and catch your quarry upon the sheet, rolling and shaping the ends so that the berries naturally roll in, and not off. A lot of other stuff will fall along with the berries: dead twigs, leaves, orchard spiders and long, thin, brown beetles. You can pick out some of the obvious stuff before scooping your harvest off the sheet and into your basket, but there’s little need in going through it very carefully at this time. Your job is to keep moving from tree section to tree section, covering as much ground as possible. Some mulberries, primarily those which are less ripe, will cling to their stems and not drop. Those are for the wildlife, or for next time, depending on your generosity.

Here is a home-fabricated harvest crook, complete with padding to reduce tree damage.

Once you have collected a sufficient amount of mulberries, they can be cleaned and sorted in batches. I nest a colander within a large bowl full of cool water, running if you have that technology. We have running water here. We run out of it all the time, and then we have to run and find more. With the water level well above the batch of berries, twigs, bugs, frass, leaves, underripe and damaged fruit will all float to the top. This can be skimmed off ‘til the sunken berries at the bottom can be easily and cleanly scooped out and set aside to drain in a second colander. Get them to a cool place soon, they will not keep long otherwise. Keep it up, batch by batch, until you have a large amount of fresh fruit ready to use or eat, and a smaller amount of damaged fruit, leaves, twigs, bugs, etc that can make its way into livestock feed. Don’t waste your time examining each berry, only take what is obviously nice. This is an abundant crop. Using these harvesting and processing techniques, I was able to produce about 8.5 pounds of good eating berries in under 4 hours, including scything down all the poison ivy around the trees. 

There is nothing like a mulberry cobbler to take one’s mind off the doom and disorder of a planet running an infernal fever. Sitting on my haunches, the cuts and callouses of my hands stained maroon black as I sweat in the shade of an old mulberry tree, I can keep my focus down where I sometimes need it, the task at hand. I scoop up my quarry, much as my forebears might have, securing them in the basket, knowing I will not starve this day, and maybe that’s enough in a burning world. On toward the next branch, I pull and flail with my crook and allow myself to be pelted with another fecund crop, birdshit and all. Later on, the chickens will get what’s theirs, and I’ll watch them with some bemusement, plucking the juicy bits out of their daily porridge of grain and whey. They eat dessert first, and maybe sometimes I would like that as well. 

As modern humans, we tend to savor these little jewels, make them special, not knowing which flush of mulberries will be our last (There are some everbearing cultivars that yield more than a single harvest, but I can detail that elsewhere), Working with food, growing it, harvesting it, processing it, eating it, isn’t an unconscious act. In fact, we try to impose some conscientiousness on the act of eating whenever we take time to say grace and reflect. Increasingly we are exhorted to “know where our food comes from.” This is all fine, all understandable, all necessary, but somehow, I’d rather be like the fat sparrows and greedy hens, sated and unaware, caught in the struggle of survival and nutrition without an awareness of the larger context, without the dreadful knowledge of future scenarios of hell on earth. 

Between those little baby pecans we planted down in the fertile bottomlands, the perhaps futile gift to a starved or extinct generation, and the git-while-the-gittins’ good mulberries spanning the hilltop, is the slope we are farming. It straddles some place between the abundant present and the uncertain future; a burnt-out, clay stricken, wind-battered hillside not unlike a lot of hillsides around here. It wears the scars of over-cultivation, overgrazing, and depletion, and maybe, if we can take a stand on it, be strong enough and act smart enough, we might make this slope, and a few others, the sort of place where we can nourish ourselves and our local ecology both now and for whoever comes along next. Either way, it’s probably best to have dessert first.

Purple hands praying for rain,

BB

(A brief post-script: It ended up raining a little bit last night into today. Not a lot, more or less .15 inches, but the overcast weather did give us an opportunity to finally pull off some seemingly successful melon and sweet potato transplants… we’ll see what the pests do. I had originally intended to use this week’s Almanac to explore the resilience of tree crops like mulberry in relation to efficient but fragile crops like alfalfa, but the climate stuff kinda got to me, again, so I’ll be providing a supplemental info-piece on moriculture and mulberry fodder for those of y’all paying to support my writing project, which costs the equivalent of one of those high-falutin’ monkey-piss flavored fancy beers, per month. You know what kind I’m talking about.)