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Mulberry
America’s forgotten fruit
I never ate a mulberry until I moved to the Great Plains seven years ago. There were countless mulberry trees in all the neighborhoods of my youth but they were all hybridized fruit-less mulberry trees. Why, oh why, would anyone want to make a fruit tree stop bearing fruit?
That first year here in this town on the plains I noticed the trees that had berries. I wondered what they were and if they were edible. A little research revealed that these berries hanging from the trees are mulberries. This little town has many, many mulberry trees and they are all the old-fashioned kind; the kind that bears fruit.
In each subsequent summer I have suffered from a condition known as Purple Hands. This is when your hands turn purple from picking so many mulberries. The berries are black but their juice is purple. The mulberries are ripe for picking from the middle of June into early August. These are the months when my hands are purple. I eat them every single day.
I know where every nearby mulberry tree is and my daily walks take me past several of them. And I simply cannot walk past a mulberry tree without greeting it and thanking it for its fruit which…
