Mulberry Madness: It's On Like Donkey Kong
Here at the tiny house with the big lot I rent, the start of summer means the start of mulberry madness. I have been at this spot for ten or so years, and every year around this time I look forward to the wild mulberry trees setting fruit and the short couple of months when I get delicious and free food. Yea, this shit really does grow on trees. My trees are sort of wild and sort of not as while I actively manage them, I don't plant them. They come up where they want to through no effort on my part and I deal with the random placement. I like to think of my yard as being freescaped. Over the years I have allowed to happen several fine trees of all sorts which I have tended to and diligently mowed around much to the confusion and angst of my next door neighbor who, ironically, is the block tree crank and personally responsible for multiple acts of city assisted arborcide. His lot has no, none, zero, zilch, nada trees on it. He took his last two sad, sick specimens out this spring because they were menacing his deck and driveway -- the guy's a loon. You can actually see the treeless dead zone he lives in from space, OK, space meaning Google maps sat image.
But, back to mulberries. Even after having to severely prune back one of my prized black mulberry trees over the winter (it had blown over the previous year and the only thing keeping it out of the driveway of my other, not as awful neighbor was a big effing rope), this has been a good year for berries. I have enough fruit that to get at more of it, I have taken to laying down a big blue tarp and shaking the berries out of the branches that are too high to get to by hand. And man, have I got a shit load of berries. Not wanting to be a waster, I have been disposing of berries by pouring frosty cold pitchers of my improved process (seedless) mulberry daiquiris into pastor_saturn and she has returned the favor by baking me a slap-your-mama good mulberry pie. I figure I can leverage another pie or so out of her with the application of more pitchers of daiquiris. ;D
The pie thing was kind of cool in an old timey, sexual division of labor way. I went outside to do the sweaty, dirty, mosquito ridden job of gathering and cleaning the mulberries, and then I got to had off them off for pie making to the capable, womanly hands of Teh Susan. It was a nice bit of teamwork. Harvesting the berries and turning them into pie was not only too much work for one person, but I don't have mad pie skillz, nor would Susan be caught dead spending a couple hours outside sweating, inhaling gnats, and feeding the skeetes to gather in ten-pints of berries.
I keep imagining next year I should try to scam RT (Russia Today television) into them sending out one of their derpy big-trouble-for-moose-and-squirrel accented reporters to come cover the summer Gaithersburg Mulberry Festival, which as you and I know dear friends, takes place only in my yard and in the space between my ears.