Mulberries, again...

Today I made a horrible discovery. One of the best mulberry trees in my neighbourhood has been cut down, in its prime.

I'm so disgusted. I know why it happened; it was dropping mulberries onto some ugly old muscle cars that were being worked on or fixed or left to die in the parking lot where the mulberry tree had the misfortune to grow. This is something that happens a lot in the city; productive fruit trees get cut down all the time because they are "messy" even though there are lots of people in this city who can't afford to buy fruit. I know some of them; sometimes I am one of them.
According to Canada's "food guide", we are all supposed to be eating something like 5 servings of fruit every day. Hmmm. I don't know anyone who eats that much, except maybe during mulberry season when fruit is plentiful and free for those who want it.

This especially galls me when I think about how we are inevitably coming to the end of this time of cheap oil and year-round cheap produce. If we had any sense, we'd be learning about which local "weeds" are good eating, which local fruits are plentiful and nutritious, when to harvest local nuts, and then passing this knowledge on to our kids. Instead, we're spraying herbicides on our "weeds" and cutting down old orchards. We're teaching kids that trees are messy nuisances that need to be cleaned up before they spill their fruits onto our cars. What's wrong with us, anyway?

I'm lucky because my parents were both raised during the depression, and both grew up essentially on farms. When I was a kid, we ate dandelion salad, ritualistically, every spring. We went mushroom hunting on the May long weekend, and found lots of delicious morels. We ate apples, pears, plums and grapes from the trees and vines that grew in the orchard behind our house. We ate fiddleheads and mayapples and we learned to forage responsibly. In the fall we picked up the walnuts and butternuts that fell from the trees and we husked them and cured them in our basement. And sometime around Christmas time, my dad painstakingly cracked them and made black walnut fudge. And it was DIVINE.

This made a great enough impression on me that foraging is still a big part of my life. We eat a lot of foraged foods in my house. (Thank you, mom and dad! Thank you, Gaia!)

My dad died in the spring of 2008, at dandelion salad time, about a month before the first morels appeared. But a couple of winters before that, as my own black walnuts cured on the basement floor, I called him and got some of his fudge secrets. Then Rob and I made a great, smooth, creamy black walnut fudge and sent a chunk out to Victoria for my folks. They called us to tell us how good it was.

Mulberries are an excellent source of vitamin C, high in bioflavonoids and fibre, and low in calories. They are sweet, juicy and delicious. Their fruit doesn't ripen all at once, so that one tree's bounty can be enjoyed for a few weeks running. The "red" mulberry is native to Southern Ontario; songbirds enjoy it's fruits, it has few pests and the wood is hard and straight-grained. I wish we would plant more of these pretty little trees, instead of systematically removing them from our cities.