Most years, after the mulberries are done for the season, I do a quick trim of the branches I can reach that are extending too far over the lawn. A couple key phrases in that sentence were “most” and “I can reach”… I am not particularly tall, and I never quite got around to bringing the ladder out each year to trim the higher branches. That resulted in quite a sprawl, particularly at the higher levels, that I didn’t really want to deal with myself, and a fruit tree that was taller than we wanted, primarily because we had no way to reach so much of that fruit.
If you’ve never had mulberries – and I personally have never seen them available uncooked in stores – you might be wondering why we didn’t just collect them when they fell. Mulberries are quite juicy, while resembling a small blackberry. I assume this juiciness is the reason for the lack of commercial availability; they don’t keep well. It also means that when they hit the ground, they immediately collect dirt. To be fair, this doesn’t stop the birds, rabbits, and other critters from eating them… we’re just a bit pickier.
I decided earlier in the summer to hire someone to trim the tree, rather than having to find the time to trim it and get the branches down to the appropriate size for the township’s branch pick-up. As you can see in this photo taken during the trimming, there were some sizable branches removed. Conveniently, my neighbor had hired a company, Paulo & Sons Tree Services (who can be reached here), mid-summer, when his branch overhanging my driveway cracked near the trunk. I kept their contact information, promising to reach out once the mulberry harvest ended for the season.
To be clear, our mulberry season usually finishes in July, nicely timed with our next wave of raspberries and strawberries, affording us the opportunity for some triple berry dishes. This has been a strange growing season in our garden – I picked a ripe strawberry today, in October, and saw another recently formed flower – and our mulberry harvest didn’t actually wind down until mid-September. In fact, the timing worked out nicely for the tree trimming to happen in cooler weather; it was still in the 80s last week. I’m hoping the raspberries are about done, so I can trim them before the branch pick-up ends for the season. (Edit: the raspberries said “I’m not dead yet!” So I ate some.) I’m happy with the trimmed mulberry, and glad someone else did the work.