Every mulberry season, I tell myself the same lie: “This year I’ll stay on top of the harvest.” Then July hits, the trees go absolutely wild, and I’m standing outside in the heat with purple-stained hands, picking berry by berry…
Every mulberry season, I lose about a third of my harvest to the sky. My white mulberry tree has grown enormous over the past decade, and the best, fattest berries always cluster near the top — completely out of reach….
If you grow mulberries — or buy them from a farmers market — you already know the heartbreak. You bring home a gorgeous haul, set them on the counter, and within 24 hours half of them are turning to mush….
Every mulberry season, I faced the same frustrating problem. My trusty old colander would hold maybe three or four pounds of berries before the ones on the bottom started getting crushed under the weight. Finding the right harvest basket mulberries…
Everything in my kitchen starts with the question: what’s the most shelf-stable, most nutritious form I can preserve this in? With mulberries, that question led me deep into fermentation — wines, vinegars, and lacto-fermented preserves that outlast any jam by months and develop flavor profiles I never expected from backyard fruit. But getting to that … Read more
I got obsessed with mulberries after eating a handful off my neighbor’s old tree on a walk and realizing I’d never tasted anything like it. Six months later I had a sapling in the ground and no real plan. Everything I’ve learned since then came from doing, failing, adjusting, and doing it again. The hardest … Read more
The pruning conversations I have with home growers are almost always the same: they’ve either done nothing for years and the tree is a tangled mess, or they’ve been too aggressive and shocked it into a non-productive sulk. Mulberries have their own timing and their own logic — once you understand the growth pattern, pruning … Read more
A mulberry tree on a homestead is a community asset — for you, for the birds, for the pollinators, and occasionally for every squirrel in a quarter-mile radius. Learning to manage that sharing relationship without losing your entire harvest to wildlife is one of the first real lessons the tree teaches you. But here’s the … Read more
Nobody warns you about the staining. I found out the hard way when I showed up to a family barbecue with purple hands, a ruined shirt, and a story that got funnier every time I told it. Now I have a whole system for harvesting, processing, and storing mulberries without looking like I lost a … Read more
One of the most overlooked aspects of a productive mulberry tree is what you plant around it — but after nearly a decade running variety trials and demonstration plots through my county extension program, I’ve learned that the second most overlooked aspect is what you do with the fruit in the roughly 48-hour window before … Read more
