We decided to walk to breakfast on Memorial Day and look what we found.
Blackberries? Right next to the busy highway.
All the greenery around looked clean and welcoming. The rain had stopped and everything looked like it had been washed.
Earlier in our walk we’d spotted honeysuckle but I wasn’t tempted to get to those. They were surrounded by poison ivy. But here, under the boughs of berries, no poison ivy. The grass was long but well kept. On the other side of the fence was our neighborhood synagogue.
Looks like blackberries, I told Ted. I googled it quickly and the variegated leaves looked like blackberry leaves. Ted tried one berry and said it was good. I tried one and indeed it was very sweet. Much sweeter than blackberries we buy at the store. These were kind of skinny though.
Okay, I said, we’ll pick them on the way home. We still had a quarter mile to go for our bagel breakfast. When we return we’d get ourselves a plastic bag to collect our find. That is if neither of us have swelled up in our faces, rolled over and died. I heard of some friends of friends who picked some wild mushroom which they thought looked exactly like edible mushroom and they got poisoned.
So during breakfast I googled blackberries to see if the bush looked the same.
It did not. The one we saw was a tree. Blackberries plants are shrubs. Be careful of the thorns when picking the fruit, the articles cautioned. No thorns, we didn’t encounter thorns. So I googled black berries/tree and learned we found mulberries.
They are mulberries! I told my husband. And edible.
How timely. Just when I have recently been all psyched about berries, having been sampling the different kinds of strawberries at several farmers markets here in Virginia and when visiting my daughter in Raleigh. Strawberries from different farms taste so deliciously unalike. Now is just perfect berry season. These seem perfectly ready to pick.
Even better, mulberry is something I’ve never tried. What harm is there in trying? (Although later in the afternoon I couldn’t get rid of that stupid ditty in my head, “Here we go round the mulberry bush!”)
So on our way home we returned to the trees. I took a closer look. Mulberry trees are tall. These three trees, about 25 to 30 feet tall, grew right next to the main street. Not strategically placed, I couldn’t tell if they were wild or someone had planted them years ago.
When we reached them we dove into the trees. Well, Ted dove. I entered into the underbrush cautiously. Hey, I’m a city mouse. Like a scared city mouse, I’m not into wildlife. To me wildlife is cockroach and gecko, best killed or shooed out of the house. I approach wild plants as suspiciously.
Once I got to know what I was getting into I happily selected and picked the fruit. Drivers stopping at the traffic light must have been entertained watching these two strange people in the bushes busy gathering fruit.
They were easy to pick. These were so ripe that the fruit practically fell out of the tree when you brushed against the branch. I later read that people place tarps under the tree and shake the branch to harvest them.
Our fingers got all red and stained. Ted collected the mulberry in his coffee cup and I placed mine in a bag. There’s something wonderfully primal gathering fruit you haven’t planted.
When we got home we washed and refrigerated them and when our neighbors came for a shared dinner that evening, we told them all about our discovery and shared the mulberries. Everyone loved them.
When I texted my daughter about it, she said, “Urban foragers?” Yup, successful for first timers. I can do this.
