Mulberry Season in Iowa.

Mulberries are in Season! 

Quick post on what we did today...  Pick Mulberries!   A rather boring fruit,  we used to eat these things by the handful back when I was a kid.   They were free, plentiful and available to all.  No adults yelled at us for picking the Mulberries. (Pears, strawberries, and black caps...  why so valuable?)  Most of the fruit we found was "wild" or in a fence row that was long abandoned.   Sometimes we would find a tree or bush by the railroad tracks and pig out.

We need more for a Pie... Or crumble?

But the Mulberries here in Iowa are a little different.   They are smaller,  and bloom only in the spring.  I might say they are a touch sweeter, but I doubt it.   Mulberries were never very tart to begin with.  Cheryl said they had a tree in their yard for years and it NEVER had any berries on it.  You can find those trees around here as well.  It seems only about 50% of the mulberry trees have berries growing on them.   I Don't know why, but if I wanted to, I'm sure I could find out.

The Only Down side is the Purple fingers! 

Otherwise,  Cheryl has been enchanted with these things ever since we arrived in Iowa.   I don't know if she never had one, or if her parents told her "all wild berries are poisonous!"   Probably the latter.  Either way, my parents were never so protective and allowed us to eat whatever we could find.

Queen Anne's Lace ( wild carrot) 

(Including "Queen Anne's Lace",   that wild white flowering weed that looks (and taste's) like a carrot.   (It is not poisonous, by the way,  but it did freak Mom out....)  Mostly they showed us how to ID the berries and turned us loose into the wild.   Ah, the good old days....   When Parents let their kids do dumb things  and there were no protective services to tell them they were parenting "wrong"...

But now that Cheryl has been making berry tars, berry ice cream, and berry crumbles,  she has been looking for new and exciting berries to experiment with.   And the Wild Black berries, Black caps, and Mulberries are the perfect test subject.   I happen to know how they will taste ( or at least their potential)  Mom used to make me ( and only me, because I was the only one who picked a buckets worth of them)  a Mulberry pie.   She used Gooseberries or lemon to give them that tart and tangy "kick" and they were very good.   ( and, as mentioned before, Mom was NO baker...)

So we shall see how Cheryl tackles these things.   What will she test first?  A Pie?  A Mulberry Icecream?   One thing is certain,  we will need to find some more!  We barely covered the bottom of the bucket with the ones we could find in our neighborhood.   I know there are more out on the Kewash trail and perhaps a few trees in Muscatine.   We shall bring the Bucket just in case.   Foraging for Berries is so fun, but back in Michigan, the Berries were much larger!  And Many of the trees were HUGE!  As compared to the rather small  "bush like" ones around here.  I could probably find out how many species of Mulberries are out there, but maybe at a later date...  Thanks for stopping in.