North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Kieran and Donna" <redherring@tnaccess.com>]

    We shook mulberries out of 4 big trees at Hector Black's back in 1991,  two of them were Illinois Everbearing.  I remember they cropped for a good 6 weeks, maybe longer.  It was long enough that his grandkids and other local kids actually got tired of raiding the trees.  The other trees did not have the size of fruit or balance of flavor, and were done cropping in just a couple of weeks.  That's the only time I have had access to so many mulberrries that I didn't know what to do with them all.  Normally I just stand under a tree and stuff myself.  I went to one of the good trees in town recently and found to my dismay that it had been cut down. 

     I remember from Smith's book on tree crops that in Afghanistan in the good ole days that dried mulberries were a staple food in winter.  People swept the ground under the white mulberry trees, let the fruit fall on the ground to dry, and then swept them up and presumably winnowed out the ants and chaff.   Seems like I have read that in all the decades of fighting there, that many of the trees were cut down, probably to cut off food supplies to the other side but I'm sure some were used as firewood too.  After all, to a passing soldier, future food production capacity is not nearly as important as it is to local farmers and residents. 

    White mulberries have lower acids than our native reds.  IE is a cross.  I would suspect that the whites have slightly higher %solids, just as plums for drying do, but it's probably not really important in a dry place like Afghanistan.  Seems like I dried some of the IE berries, but I don't really remember what they tasted like.  I think they had more of a flavor like raisins than any of the other fruit I have dried.  Generally I prefer sour apples to sweet apples when dried, but seems like the white mulberries were a little nicer that way.  Just out of curiosity, have any of the rest of you tried drying mulberries?  What did you think?  Did yo use them for anything?  I almost never cook with dried fruit, I prefer just to use it for snacks.   Donna