This weekend I made jam. I know, big whoop. But this jamming experience was unlike anything I could have imagined.
The whole project was conceived while visiting a friend. While giving me a tour of their extensive fruit tree orchard she pointed out and gave me a sample from a mulberry tree. It was fantastic! Not being an arborist, I’m not tree savvy.
I’m standing in awe under this mulberry tree. I’ve never seen a producing mulberry tree. Back in grade school our fourth grade class raised silkworms in what I'm sure was some sort of illegal sweat shop operation. Every day someone would be responsible for harvesting a handful of mulberry leaves to feed the audibly munching worms. During spelling tests we were all distracted by the 50 munching caterpillars housed back by the sink. It was horror movie creepy. I was planning on getting a kimono out of the whole operation - I didn’t get squat.
The trees on the school grounds had beautiful green leaves, but no fruit. All I’d known about the mulberry involved monkeys and weasels. So how I found myself on all fours, collecting ripe fruit for processing is still a bit of a mystery.
After collecting four overflowing bowls of fruit we then had to wash, and strip, and mash, and boil, and jar, and boil and cool... it was an all day operation. We came out with about 40 jars of gorgeous mulberry jam. Fortunately the tree-owner was berry savvy and gave me surgical gloves to strip the berries so my hands retained their translucent pink hue. She was also berry savvy enough to give me the job of stripping the berries, so those same hands are still locked in a cramped curl. Clearly she had found her jam making patsy. I stripped for about four hours. (There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.)
When we were done, I crawled to my car dragging my bottles of jam by my teeth. Her dog watched and tried to pee on me once. I kicked at the dog and got in my car, smiling weakly, trying desperately not to let her know how jam-out-out-of-shape I clearly am.
She smiles back at me... and let’s me know another harvest will happen in a week or so. I think, in this instance, I’m the weasel.
Those really look like caterpillar jam ingredients- a delicacy in other parts of the world.
Anonymous
April 15, 2009 at 5:07 PM
Nice one. I wish i could grow this mulberry tree. I have is the small fruit type.
TS
May 14, 2010 at 3:34 AM
My daughter and I picked about 2 quarts of mulberries today. She had been questioning me on what the berries were all spring. I remeber eating them as a child and their similar appearance to rasberries (except the stem). I never asked anyone if I could eat them as a child but did anyway. So, now they are ripe and you guessed it, we looked it up on line just to be sure they were safe to eat. Tonight we will eat our harvest...black mulberries, yum.
Anonymous
May 30, 2010 at 4:52 PM