Local Superfood Spotlight: Mulberries

End of June, and the mulberries are ripe.  It seems there was a nice trend to plant mulberries and service berries in public areas around our town as edible landscaping some years ago, and we are now reaping the benefits.  There seem to be ripe mulberry or service berry trees on nearly every street, often the service berries are lining the boulevard all the way along.

Tips for harvesting:
The mulberry trees are generally easy to spot - distinctive lobed leaves, and the tell-tale signs of a blue-stained sidewalk or roadway below.   These trees can be quite tall, so picking by ladder might be in order to get the most benefit.  It's often easiest to gather the berries that have fallen to the ground, or climb the lower tree limbs and shake the branches to drop berries below onto a waiting ground sheet.

Why are mulberries a superfood?
Mulberries are one of our amazing nutrient-dense local superfoods.  They are full of antioxidants, high levels of vitamins (A, C, E, K), iron, protein and fibre, and also help boost the immune system. They have been found to regulate the blood sugar, and also help cleanse the blood and detoxify the body by stimulating the liver.  They are all around wonderful, tasty, and easily harvestable locally (for free!) if you take a bit of time to find them.

How to use:
We love freezing mulberries for winter smoothies, but also eat them fresh in our granola, or by the handful as we pick them.  They make a wonderful pie, jam and jelly as well.  Mulberries, when dried, are perfect for trailmixes or eating as a snack on the go.

Last of the June berries...wild harvesting around town

We spent the morning wildharvesting fruit with a few other neighbourhood families - mostly mulberries from a huge tree that we've found around the corner growing near a parking lot.  In other years we've climbed the tree and shaken the berries onto a tarp below, but this year the season has gone so quickly with all the rain that the berries were mostly on the ground.  However, with only about half an hour of gathering we filled numerous quart baskets - and not to mention the ones eaten directly by our little helpers!  At the end of the picking there were beautiful purple mulberry stained hands, faces, mouths, pants, toes...  We also noticed a nearby cherry tree loaded with the last cherries of this season, just past their prime and falling off the tree.  We checked with the home owner and picked several baskets full too.  There are so many abandoned or wild edibles around the city so it feels good to take in some of the local harvest to enjoy over the winter months.

100-Mile Desserts: Four Fruit Crisp

It's mulberry season! We've been out wild-harvesting the mulberries, and in this region they are not hard to find as these trees grow fairly abundantly, though often unnoticed and unpicked. They do take quite a bit of work to harvest as the berries are small and need nimble fingers to be plucked off the tree. Once ripened, they drop quickly and so it's often easiest to gather them from an undisturbed area on the ground. It's a juicy mess, including purple stained knees, shoes and fingers! But well worth the effort to have the berries for baking or smoothies later in the winter months. I also baked a few 100-mile desserts using the fresh mulberries...here's the recipe for a four fruit crisp, and in the next post the recipe for mulberry-cherry scones. The crisp can be made vegan if you leave out the butter and add extra oil. We just heard about a source for locally produced sunflower oil (from a farm near London) so now we have another source beyond always using local canola.

Four Fruit Crisp - adapted from Simply in Season

1 1/2 cups each of four kinds of fruit (we used apples, rhubarb, cherries and mulberries)
1 1/2 cups local organic flour
1 1/2 cups local organic oats
6 Tbsp butter
4 Tbsp canola or sunflower oil
1/2 cup maple syrup or honey

1) Mix fruit together in a 10-inch deep baking or pie pan.
2) Mix the flour, oats, butter, oil and sweetener together in a large bowl. Blend until crumbly.
3) Evenly sprinkle topping over the fruit.
4) Bake in prepared oven at 375F until fruit bubbles and top is golden brown, about 30 min.

Serves 8.

Would be lovely served warm with locally made organic icecream, like Mapletons (does that count as 100-Mile??)