Lots and lots of mulberries. Right by our driveway for our camp in Oklahoma we have a rather large tree of white mulberries. I'm not a big fan of them raw, I think they taste like nothing but sweet. Since we're not up here often, when we "picked" off the tree the first time, we just hit everything (literally) to knock off good, bad, dried old ones, etc, and give the rest of the young ones a chance.
We spread old bed sheets and visquene (can't spell that...) around the tree, held them down with rocks from the dirt road and started shaking. Nathan (my brother) was using that stick to shake outer branches while my mom and I picked up berries enough for him to walk around (that's what all those little dots on the sheets are). She also took the pictures for me.
My dad climbed the tree in order to get the taller branches. He used a ladder leaned against the tree to get in and just crawled around in the rest of it.
That's after they've all been washed and the bad ones pulled out. It came out to a scant 4 gallons. I raw packed a few quarts, made a few pints of jam, and dehydrated some. We stuck some of the dehydrated ones in a butternut squash souffle the other night. They worked out just like dried raisins and figs, the seeds softened up wonderfully and didn't crunch. We'll be picking some more this week sometime, as they've had about a week to grow some more and such, most of them will be dehydrated with possibly one pie for my dad's sake.
No comments:
Post a Comment