Mulberry Alert: It’s mulberry season– the time of year you can find berries splat on the street and cars–and best, smack in your mouth.
I’ve been checking out mulberries in my neighborhood in keeping with Mulberry Madness, an annual event sponsored by the Baltimore Orchard Project (BOP) to boost mulberries as an urban food source.
Since I’ve been investigating, I see the trees everywhere in the city, especially in Wyman Park and the 170-year-old Stone Hill neighborhood. If you don’t know where they are, look for the tell-tale signs deep purple and red splotches on the street, or on the cars. But don’t let the stains put you off. They are the source of some transformative childhood memories and nutrition rivalling blueberries.
Mulberry memories
Nina Cardin, founder of the Baltimore Orchard Project (BOP) described how she harvested mulberries recently with two of her grandchildren. First, she gathers the materials: the sheets (to catch the mulberries), the tins (to put them in), the picker (to shake and gently beat the tree with).
They go to the tree, she writes poetically in an email, “and lay the sheets under the most promising branches, as if setting a table or arranging a bed. Then approaching the tree and in a way, asking permission to harvest, we shake the branches! the little one grabs the lower branches and shakes; the bigger one takes this special shaking stick that someone from the BOP made for me! And then the real fun begins – the berries drop like rain, all around us. They love the power they have, the connection with the tree, the bounty that falls at their feet. It is pure joy.”
Food writer Rob Kasper recalls a childhood encounter with mulberries on the way to the ball field with his rag tag baseball team. “As a boy of 10 I would climb a trio of mulberry trees that stood in a park near a baseball field. En route to a loosely organized pickup game, we ballplayers—a collection of brothers, cousins and neighborhood kids—would toss down our gloves and bats and scale the trees.
“We quickly learned to hunt for the darkest berries, discarding the tart white and red ones, fingering the dark mealy orbs and popping them into our mouths.
“Later in life I would discover deeper pleasures—the piercingly delightful taste of raspberries, low-bush blueberries and Oregon huckleberries. But as a kid, perched in a tree, shaded from the summer sun and feasting on found fruit, the mulberries seemed like treasure.”
Growing up, we feasted on a mulberry tree in the driveway of my friend Paula’s house. We dined on mulberries for a treat before going out to explore the neighborhood.
(Send your mulberry memories to the comment section below)
My friend Joyce is not so romantic about the fruit: when she first moved to Baltimore, she planted a tree in the fall to enhance the backyard. By spring, the tree was thriving. She set up a sandpile under the shade of the tree for her toddler daughter, who she dressed up to play in some pretty white pants with a new little t-shirt. When her daughter came in from playing, the pants were stained from cuff to waist in bright purple. That was how Joyce discovered she had planted a mulberry tree.
Admittedly, the mulberry has gotten a bad rap, sometimes deserving. It stains clothes, patios, cars and whatever it falls upon. Deb Howard, one of BOPs advocates, promotes the mulberry and service berries as little known, even disrespected, fruit that deserves a second bite. She eats mulberries in waffles. “It’s great to mix in yoghurt. My whole family loves mulberries.”
According to Healthline, the mulberry is an antioxidant and a great source of Vitamin C and iron, plus K & E, and other vitamins. The mulberry tree gained prominence in China for its leaves, which were the only food the silkworm would eat.
Mulberry Madness
This month volunteers are foraging for the berries from the streets and parks of Baltimore, bringing in this ignored fruit into the everyday diet of Baltimore citizens.
They will collect a total of about 40-50 pounds. These are distributed to vendors as raw material for whatever delectable food they can make. Atwater’s makes mulberry jam. and Gertrude’s will create lemon ricotta pancakes with mulberries, which will be available for sale at the Waverly Farmers’ Market in Baltimore Saturday, June 17 for culmination of Mulberry Madness. There will also be mulberry soap and mulberry muffins.
Baltimore Orchard Project: increasing trees and fruit in the city
Besides promoting mulberries, the Baltimore Orchard Project has planted over 2,000 fruit trees since 2013 with the help of volunteers and the expertise and resources of the Baltimore Tree project. Cardin came up with the idea of planting fruit trees in neighborhoods that lacked access to fresh food, while she was in Boston when her husband was on sabbatical at Harvard in 2013.
” I kept reading about food deserts, community dissolution and the need to craft community cohesiveness. What can connect all this? It all pointed to fruit trees. I decided to start an organization to plant and harvest fruit trees in food deserts and vacant lots in Baltimore,” Cardin says.
The project has been doing its share to increase the tree canopy in the city, which has as its goal to increase the tree canopy by 40 percent by 2037. At the same time, the fruit trees provide a source of fresh fruit in food deserts. According to BOP, one in four Baltimore City residents live in a food desert, with limited access to fresh food.
Rather than planting a large orchard, the Baltimore Orchard Project is working on a small scale to offer individual homeowners a kind of tree kit, the Home Orchard Project (conveniently acronymed HOP), which includes a fruit tree, two blueberry bushes and perennials. HOP will plant in pre-approved neighborhoods.
Two years ago, next to the community garden in Druid Hill park, the group created an orchard of 20 fruit trees to use as a model for pruning and other kinds of workshop to demonstrate to urban tree growers how to care for their fruit trees. Volunteers worked with Tree Baltimore, which provided the trees: fig, persimmon, apple and pear. On a recent visit with Deb Howard, former president of BOP, the 2-year-old trees looked healthy, fresh and green. Wire fences surrounding each tree keep the deer out, native wildflowers are planted to keep the weeds and a device Deb calls “tree diapers,” plastic covering the roots under the mulch, keeps the moisture in.
“We planted this orchard to host pruning events so people could come and take the skills back,” says Deb.
Back on a walk from the park, through Stone Hill, my feet are squishing hundreds of mulberries. The berries are covering the SUVs and the street with deep purple dots. Maybe, some say, urban blight. I say it is urban delight. I savor the ripest one, nearly black, sweet and free.
