From the Archives: Mulberries

Propagating hope on the edge between scarcity and abundance

No time to convey this in prose: It has been a busy week with little sign of things slowing down and a handful of time/weather critical tasks ahead of us— namely transplanting sweet potato slips, eggplant and pepper, moving poultry wagons, continued irrigation repair, moving hog pasture, moving shelters, and just generally moving, moving, moving. Though, I have had some moments of repose, or at least I’ve stopped off briefly to collect mulberries on the various tick-laden footpaths between hither and yon. Some of them are bland, others delectable. I have watched fat robins twist in the wind on thin stems to gulp them down, while other trees are hardly untouched, perhaps on account of the abundance of winged-food available with the cicadas.

It has seemed that my options for the almanac this week were to either rush through a piece that wouldn’t have been all that great, or to dust off a couple of pieces from the archive, specifically concerning mulberries. I’ve had a pretty steep increase in readership since those days, so these bits will be new to a lot of y’all, and some indication of what all you might find buried deep in the almanac archives for supporting readers. Either way, shake down your favorite mulberry, get your fingers stained, and for a moment, let us consider the Mora genus…

Doom & Mulberries

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

Hope & Mulberries

For the past five days, I’ve been watching the rain forecast swell for today. This morning, NWS backed off on the chances for precipitation again. It’s full sun out there right now. I’ll say this, though… all this drought does seem to make the mulberries sweeter. The serviceberries and black cap raspberries are all extra sweet too, but they’re a bit shrunken or shriveled or something. The strawberries had their moment, and are now feeling quite parched, their blooms stifled, their leaves curled.  As far as fruit tree foliage goes, the pears, peaches, and apples appear weathered, dull, and exasperated. The mulberry leaves though, they gleam. They shine in the sun, neon green at the tips, vigorous in the hot wind.  We planted two dozen new mulberries this year; it rained the day after they went in, and that’s been it for six weeks now, give or take a few ephemeral bouts of precipitation. All of them are alive, rooted, and putting on significant growth. Some people call this tree a weed, and entire state governments have led poisoning campaigns against it. And they’re not winning.

In my last piece, I scratched the surface on mulberries a little. But now, I’m going to take a bit more time and space to get down to it. Why? Because mulberries could continue to play a vital role in the human project of agriculture for time to come, if we as a species decide to keep tending soil for food as opposed to lab engineering it. And I’m awful fond of them too.

The mulberry has been in cultivation for some 7,000 years, give or take a millenium, and is widely considered to be the first agroforestry crop. A crop that has shared an evolution with humans since neolithic times has a few things to show for it. I have alluded to the fruit, leaf fodder, and coppicing abilities already, and here I’m going to share a bit more on how we’re integrating these trees into our diverse foodscape, and honor some of the work that has taken this tree as far as it has come. If I were to document and distill those first, say, 6,500 years, this would be a much larger document than I can handle, with so many things needing tending, so I’ll be focusing on mulberries in their post-settlement North American context, that is, how they interplay with our current problems.

Mulberries have been present on our land and in our region for some time. We are well within the native range of Morus rubra here in Northeast Missouri, and seem to have fewer alba or hybrid specimens present, as the brief North American silk industry never quite crept out here. Still, there are plenty around. The first silk speculation bubble popped early on, supplanted by tobacco, a less laborious, more profitable crop, and cotton, a fiber crop that was far more profitable, for some folks anyway. Morus alba is widely used for silk culture, as this is the tree that had been selected for larger, more nutritious, and more readily stripped leaves for going on 7 millennia. 

The first short-lived American period of sericulture (that is, silk farming) was very much a colonial endeavor. And I’m using the word colonial with all its modern connotations… call it Critical Species Theory. In a 1655 book with quite the prolonged title, The Reformed Virginia Silkworm; or, a Rare and New Discovery of a Speedy Way, and Easie Means, found out by a Young Lady in England for the Feeding of Silk Worms in the Woods, on the Mulberry-Tree Leaves in Virginia, the author states that the introduction of sericulture in the colonies “will not only be the means of enriching the colonies and the mother country, but will result in the civilization and conversion of the Indians.”  Much like cryptocurrency, I don’t know how serious everybody really was about this speculation. Seems to me that the “civilization and conversion” bit may have been the marketing jargon of the day.

King James, who ordered and received his own translation of the Bible (yeah, that King James), did his best to impose sericulture on the Virginia and Georgia colonies during his reign, partly because he hated tobacco, partly because he adored silk, but mostly because he wanted a piece of the economic action, as England’s own silk industry underwent climate difficulties, due in part to the Little Ice Age.

After the heavily guarded secret behind Chinese silk production became commonly known, sericulture made its way to continental Europe. The English did manage to plant a healthy population of Morus alba, remnants of which still exist today, but could not synchronize worm hatching with the bud-break of the mulberry, as the hatchling worms prefer only the tenderest young leaves of the tree. Many people involved in the attempted British silkworm industry, mostly women, were made to clutch eggs and young larvae to their bosom, to keep the precious critters warm and viable. But he climate persisted and these attempts were to no avail, and thus it was decreed by King James that Morus alba must be planted at a rate of 10 trees per 100 acres in the colonies, under heavy economic penalty. In effect, KJ’s insistence on this caused the price of mulberry seedlings to skyrocket, while the labor associated with sericulture carried a low wage, and the colonists eventually shrugged it off and went with tobacco and cotton plantations instead. And that, of course, would lead in part to the promulgation of slavery in the colonies.

Nowadays, Morus alba (a native of China and India) co-mingles with our native rubra throughout the eastern parts of the U.S. While alba has better, more nutritious leaves for livestock, and arguably, sweeter fruit, it also is susceptible to Popcorn Disease, making our native mulberry more resilient in regards to disease. Alba/rubra hybrids commonly cross, forming an often seed sterile hybrid. (Mulberry fun fact: Male mulberries eject their pollen at half the speed of sound; it is the quickest biological movement on earth.) With modern breeding techniques and knowledge, we can likely improve on native mulberries to carry some of the leaf and fruit characteristics of their Asian cousins, perhaps without having to wait another 7,000 years. We don’t have that long, folks.

While modern efficiencies might work to produce a silk that is less exploitive of labor, or even insects, silk is still a luxury. Yes, it is strong, and yes it light, and I’m not suggesting polyester is made of superior materials, but I do question the need for mass-produced, labor and resource intensive textiles in a world overrun with clothing. I’ll save it for the Fashion Edition. 

Besides, I’m here to talk about how we’re employing mulberry in our project to keep soils, animals, and human beings healthy, not dress them up in silk finery. Though I would like to see some of our sows dressed up in silk. Whatever mulberry species are represented upon your land-base, be they the endangered native variety or the common, weedy, type, the mulberry stands out as a particularly high value tree, regardless of your land-use system. It will feed you, entertain your kids, feed the birds, piss off the neighbors and remain persistent on the landscape when other fruits, with more razzle-dazzle, are weakened by drought, poor soil, pests and disease.  

It is a tough tree indeed. Its tendency to sprout and resprout keeps them present in the landscape, even where deer pressure is high. After some years of deer browsing, the unprotected mulberry will take on a rugged, weathered form. But it won’t die, and when it manages to fruit under these conditions, the fruit appears lowdown in a place easy for swine, poultry, children and wildlife to reach. Whether it is from bird carried seed or the hydra-like resprouts, mulberry is nothing if not persistent.

Here in Northeast Missouri, many early blooming fruits, like peaches, cherries, and plums will be nipped by late frosts, an ever-increasing risk in the odd late-winter warm spells that have become so prevalent here. The mulberry flowers late, and even in instances where the flowers are hit with a late breaking frost, it will often try again, and succeed. 

Then, there are the “ever-bearing” cultivars. Some trees will bear a crop twice in a year, or even more frequently. Here in our zone, “Illinois Everbearing” and “Silk Hope” (A hybrid discovered in the wild by Dr. AJ Bullard) are the cultivars that seem to work for us best in terms of berry production, but we have some other types planted this spring to give us more data. In more southern parts of the U.S. the famed varieties “Hicks” and “Stubbs” were once commonly planted around the hog yard, producing up to a quart of fruit per day over a 3-4 month long period. The fruit drops, the hogs laze and eat it up. Historic tree nerd and personal inspiration J. Russel Smith made the, I’m going to say, bold claim, that a mature “Hicks” could fatten two hogs a year. Seems like a stretch, but I’ll acknowledge I’ve never met this tree. A variety I’ve been excited about for a long time is “Kokuso”, reputed to have the tastiest leaves, but I haven’t been able to score a specimen yet (Let me know if you can hook me up with some scionwood).

My initial work in integrating mulberry into our swine and poultry yard (livestock food forest) was spent digging up mulberry seedlings growing up along the garden fences, under rooflines, and any other inconvenient place and replanting them where they can overhang and shade our summertime pig and poultry nurseries. Some trees turned out to be the non-fruiting males, others have ended up being quite productive females. 

Another mulberry fun fact: Mulberries are a little gender-queer sometimes. Not sure what the scientific term is, look it up yourself, but mulberries will, on occasion, change genders and either begin fruiting or producing pollen. Some folks suspect that the population alters its gender for evolutionary reproductive purposes, switching teams to maintain a more balanced population in any given location, but we don’t seem to really know. But add it to the list of things that make nature a little queer. Normal ain’t natural.

 Anyhow, within a few years of planting I’ve been able to determine the gender of the trees. I will coppice or pollard some of the males on occasion, feeding the the whole branches out to hogs or goats. Goats do a particularly nice job, stripping the branches of bark for a quick drying bundle of kindling, while expectant sows will at least clean up the leaves before carrying the branches off to build a nest for farrowing. Sometimes I’ll swipe my hand along the long limbs and stems of trees and sprinkle handfuls of leaves into the chicken feed pans. It is not the first thing they eat, but they will nibble them up eventually, and the ducks in particularly are fond of them.

I have attempted to graft female scionwood of tasty or morphologically useful varieties onto some male trees, with minimal success, though others suggest this is easy. I’ll be attempting this again with bud grafting as opposed to whip-and-tongue this summer. One nicely shaped variety is the “Weeping Mulberry,” which forms a berry-rich shelter for chickens and ducks to hide from weather and aerial predators.

I do have one very tall, broad mulberry that grows sweet, creamy, lavender tinged fruits. It is a favorite tree for our chicks to roost in at night, and unlike the dark fruits on the other tree, they are mostly ignored by the birds, and so our chicken food forest does provide an abundant and secret treat for humans.

Further afield, out on our warm season tallgrass prairie pastures, we have just integrated a contoured line of Morus alba, interspersed with Thornless Honey Locust (Gleditsia Tricanthos inerma) and some interesting cultivars of mulberry like “GR-1” and “Oscar”. We chose a line that bisected a steep slope with high potential for erosion and little shade or shelter. The trees are fairly tightly spaced to create a shady band for livestock to relax in, ruminate, and of course, browse for leaves, once they’re more established. This planting will likely provide a nutritional benefit to both our ruminant and monogastric animals at times when grasses are declining in palatability and the sun is high and sharp overhead. The deeper cover of mulberry is broken up by the more dappled shade of the honey locust, encouraging grass to continue growing beneath this restful and comfortable canopy in the heat of summer. Some of the mulberries will be encouraged to grow tall and bear fruit, others will be managed with coppicing and pollarding, similarly to the pig and poultry yard. Once the area has been grazed or scythe-mown in late summer, mature honey locusts will drop their sugar and protein rich pods onto the shorn sward of grass, easily collected with a rake and cart for winter fodder.

Another project on the farmstead this year, unless I just spend all my time writing about it, will be experimenting with effective and efficient leaf harvesting at human scale. As I’ve mentioned before, the leaves of the mulberry are quite easily hand plucked. Green stems of the mulberry are relatively quick to snip, make into bundles and put up as “tree hay”, and much work is being done in silk producing regions like China and India to industrialize the process with custom machinery, a solution that is quite more efficient than it is resilient, if you wanted to place it on a spectrum (and I do). What will be the best technique for our scale here? I’ll get back to you on it, if you haven’t fallen asleep by then.

It did rain a bit today, like it always does when I write about the lack of rain. It hit us hard for a few minutes, my rain gauge is broke and I haven’t had any motivation to get a new one, so let’s just call it a tenth of an inch, maybe two. I had a hog get lost outside his fence when the deluge hit, and soaking wet we both figured out the way back to where he belonged. I took a break from that small emergency to dash uphill and see to it that the turkey poults were safely under cover, as they don’t develop the glands for water repellent oil for a few more weeks. Then I found a piglet stuck on its back, wedged in a feed trough, wrestled with him a bit (Lucky #2 is his name, Lucky #1 is now only with us metabolically) and when I finished up with all that fun stuff, plus spending a few minutes hunting for secret egg clutches hidden out in the low branches of the Eastern Red Cedar, I took a step back and breathed in the humidity air, taking a moment to determine whether or not this rain had done much. The cracks in the earth are still present, hay will still cost an arm and a leg, the beans and corn are sad, and the apples and pears have drooping brown terminal buds, the sure sign of a tree in water conservation mode. But the mulberries are still resplendent and sweet.

We’re making our way toward a very uncertain future. What has worked in the past isn’t working as well now, well some of it at least. I think mulberry is among several alternatives to our current industrial food system that holds efficiency in balance with resilience, ecosystem services in balance with production, and human needs in balance with those of the natural world we hope to rejoin. It stands, undepleted and prepared to offer more on this dusty, wilted landscape. A giving tree that can withstand the taking. As to whether or not Morus alba is appropriate in the North American context is a question for sure, but in a lot of ways, that cat has been let out the bag, along with all the other invasive consequences of colonialism. We needn’t embrace how it came to be here, but oddly enough, we may come to embrace its role in a shifting ecological landscape. Ecology isn’t the story of stasis, it is a story of succession, and a weedy tree like the mulberry might just have a role to play in our ascent towards complex systems of biological survival. And the berries are extra sweet, in a drought.