All around the mulberry….tree?

We have a mulberry tree here at the house. Apparently the monkey and the weasel were mistaken….mulberries come from trees not bushes. Last year, I didn’t know what it was and was a bit scared to try the berries. This year, after it was identified, I started collecting them like little gold nuggets.

You see, I had a dream. A dream to make mulberry jam. I wasn’t able to have a garden this year and likely won’t next year. We just have too much to do on the house for me to spend time gardening. So, I wanted to use what was provided to me. Early in the spring, I made dandelion jam, so why not mulberry jam?

I pictured bushels of berries. More than I would know what to do with. Berries coming out of my eyeballs.

Not so much.

First, the birds love the mulberries. They eat tons of them, then poop purple all over. Second, I can only reach so many branches. I wasn’t getting a ladder out every day to collect berries. Third, the mulberries on our tree didn’t ripen all at the same time. We would go out and collect what we could reach. On a good day, we would get maybe two hand-fulls.

Typical daily harvest

So, the kids and I would go pick mulberries every day, clean them, and freeze them until we had enough for jam.

Looks about right.

I was pretty excited about making the jam. I have only made jam once before and it was made with dandelions, so the thought of making something people would actually WANT to try excited me.

I tried to crush them in a food masher to remove the stems, but it didn’t work so well.