Yummmmm. If you have never tasted a mulberry–or maybe you remember browsing them as a kid back east or in the Midwest–you will be blown away by the glorious mulberry harvest happening right now at Mission Garden!
Tia Marta here tempting your tastebuds for a gentle, natural sweet treat–but…you have to take action SOON. If you’re in southern Arizona, find a hole in your schedule, and a way to get to the base of Tucson’s A-Mountain this week for a mulberry taste-thrill. It will inspire a new planting in your desert home landscape. Three different mulberries await you in Mission Garden’s beautiful and diverse orchards. Come early–summer hours are Wednesday thru Saturday, 8am-noon.
A sumptuous harvest after this wet winter! Look for trees on the Mission Garden grounds that have a big white fabric tarp underneath, and voila! Shake a branch and dive in for a dark, delicious, delicate mulberry, fresh from the tree. The elongated fruit shown here is Pakistani mulberry (Morus alba x rubra), producing like mad even in Tucson’s heat.
Female trees produce fruit. Male, pollen-producing, trees are controversial in Tucson due to allergenic affects. Somewhere out there, there must be male mulberries; none are growing at Mission Garden, yet we have no dearth of fruit.
Handmade mulberry jams are going fast at the Mission Garden entrance shop! It’s the best jam you ever tasted, made with love by Mission Garden volunteers in their health-department-certified kitchen. You can’t find local gourmet delicacies like this commercially. The closest thing (like frozen raspberries at a grocer’s freezer?) can’t hold a candle to Mission Garden mulberry jam or sauce! ($8 for the 8oz. jar)
Mulberry jam doubles as a gourmet sauce. My pedestrian apple-brown-betty morphed into a fancy dessert with ala mode topped by a dollup o’ Mission Garden’s mulberry jam. (Mulberry seeds in the sauce are minimal and add a tiny crunch texture.)
As you explore further through the Mission Period huerta (orchard) you’ll find yet another gorgeous green mulberry tree with a totally different color and shape of fruit. (Above, looking up into the foliage, and ripe fruit adjacent) This is white mulberry (Morus alba) with a pale pink or lavender color, and a flavor some people describe as “watermelon” or “lingonberry” or “cloud berry.” So juicy you can’t stop….
A big surprise is to learn that we have a NATIVE mulberry “bush” in the arid Southwest–the wild, small-leafed mulberry tree (Morus microphylla). It’s inspiring to know it is adapted to our Sonoran Desert, only needing a little extra water; it grows close to arroyos out in Nature. This may be one of those amazing plants that may help provide food for us in a hotter, drier future…
Each little wild mulberry is a zap of sweet nutrition, packed with healthy complex sugars, dietary fiber, beta carotines, vitamin C and iron.
I can hardly wait until Mission Garden is propagating cuttings of all these several amazing mulberry species. Already I’m figuring where I can plant them in my yard. Whatever we can’t harvest each season will be a gift for the birds!
This coming SATURDAY, MAY 18, is SAN YSIDRO FIESTA, Mission Garden’s celebration of the traditional pilkan harvest (heirloom wheat harvest). I’ve been playing with recipes using these heirloom grains pairing them with mulberries, but I HAD to relay this timely mulberry story for you ASAP, so you could get to Mission Garden this week to jump through this narrow “mulberry window” of opportunity.
Tia Marta hoping to see you at San Ysidro Fiesta Saturday–or sooner, browsing a mulberry tree this week!