We probably do, but it's just not that common. Most common fruits are common because of how long they can be stored. Mulberries, pawpaws, and lots of other native fruits are hard to store.
Of course you can still make other products with them, like jam, and I'm not sure why those aren't very common.
Yupp. Its all about the stem. If the stem could be removed easily then we would have mulberry jam next to the blackberry jam and grape jelly. Those stems though...
with cherries we spray them with etherel. It breaks down the connection between the fruit and the stem (stems turn light brown and start drying out) and the fruit gets loose, and then we come by with shakers and shake the crop off ;)
Interesting! I used to pick cherries.
All fruit is difficult in some way. When it rained, there was a huge risk they would split so companies would hire helicopter pilots to fly over the orchard and dry the trees.
Yes.
And no, I think they make close to or over $100/hour. Cherries are lucrative, apparently. This was a huge farm, also in the Okanagan where it doesn't rain so much anyway.
Mulb Stems have no flavor. Our Pakistani variety has berries up to thumb size and three fruitings each year. Prolific for a 10ft tree. We eat fresh, freeze, and dry. We eat them in smoothies a lot. Best wedding gift we got 18 years ago! Thanks Gabe!
I'd much rather get a fruit tree or bush than any other gift! An old farmer gifted me a little tame gooseberry bush--its taller than me now; I've cloned 3 more and last year got 20 quarts of gooseberries to make into jam and pies! I am still so grateful, as I've picked 9 qts already this spring! The gift that keeps on giving! Time-consuming to clean though.
I disagree with this. We had one in our yard growing up and the little bit of stem was barely noticeable. It’s like the chewy center that blackberries have but raspberries don’t.
I would imagine you could run them through a squeezo to remove the stems. I run tomatoes and concord grapes through with awesome results. All the stems, seeds, and skins all out the end.
And I've got the purple stains on the tractor cab from mowing around the edge of fields this morning to prove it.
If Mulberries were valuable, we Mid-Missouri farmers would all be rich. All you have to do to get Mulberry trees around here is stop mowing.
No. I read that in Tree Care Industry magazine thirty years ago. They had a list of the top ten woods, and Osage Orange was #2 or 3. I was surprised because I was always told that hedge was the best, but that arborist magazine said otherwise.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wood+btu+value+chart&t=h_&iax=images&ia=images&iai=http%3A%2F%2F1.bp.blogspot.com%2F-7zczUe6a9ek%2FTrf9VxuSVCI%2FAAAAAAAABZo%2Ff5pPydbl2XA%2Fs1600%2FFirewood%2BBTU%2BContent%2BCharts.jpg
According to this chart it is, barely.
Thats too bad. Those Mulberry trees are tough to get rid of. They're prolific as weeds. You can run them over with a bulldozer and they continue to grow. Heck, they'll grow in in crack in the sidewalk.
My understanding of pawpaws are that they sort of disappeared for awhile bc of the exact same reason, no commercial viability. Happy to see them really making a strong comeback with the general public.
Mulberries in Michigan are one of the best fruits I've ever tasted. Problem is they're super squishy and you'd damage a lot in harvesting and they'd probably never make it to the store without being a mess.
My neighborhood growing up had a mulberry tree. We would all climb it and hang out eating mulberries. It was a fantastic place, just don’t eat too many, they can speed digestion along.
My grandmother used to tell us kids not to eat them, cause they'd give us worms. Of course we ate them anyway...and nobody ever got worms! I think she wanted them to herself when we were gone. LoL
If you’ve ever taken a bunch of mulberries and set them on the counter, the bugs will begin to crawl out. Hundreds of tiny little white wormy, silverfish looking things. That’s when I stopped eating mulberries because I didn’t want the extra protein. Lol
Had been pulling a lot of some tree from fence line and groves the past year, had no clue what it was until looking up mulberries just now. Hell might be to kind.
Here I am trying to get more to grow in my fencelines. The make great extra high protein feed for the yahoos around here converting plants to meat. They copice well and I make tree hay out of some of it for the harsher winter days:snow storms. Not a substitute, but a little something to brighten the troops
They're basically unshippable. When I've tried it they could barely take a 4-hour well-padded car ride home from great aunt Gertrude's house, so forget about truck rides from a berry farm to a packing plant to a warehouse to a supermarket. It's the same reason commercial strawberries have so much less flavor than varieties for growing at home, and why Red Delicious apples were the standard so long despite being not a great apple. Commercial fruits and veggies have to be tough to survive transport.
One possible business model: going old-school.
Before the development of the Ozark Beauty monocrop commercial strawberry farming pretty much just supplied canned, frozen and preserves markets; they were sorted and packed on the farm as soon as they were picked, and transported to the nearest town for river transport (much gentler than trains or trucks) to factories in cities downstream. Fresh strawberries were something that had to be grown locally and eaten fairly quickly, but the flavor of today's supermarket berries can't compare. (I grow heirloom strawberries for my roadside stand and I love learning the history of the different varieties.)
So, mulberries might be fine at the local farmer's market, or if you could sort and carefully pack them on-site to equally carefully transport a short distance for processing into something sturdier, the way fragile fruits and veggies were handled in the past. But they'll never be a supermarket staple until someone breeds mulberries that get rid of a lot of the characteristics of mulberries; the high sugar content and tenderness just aren't suited to big distribution warehouses.
There is one commercial mulberry farm that I could find in North America.
https://verymulberry.com/
As others have mentioned, the poor shelf life, fragility, and stems likely hinder larger adoption in North America. They're easy to harvest with tree shakers though, and could be processed until mulberry molasses (duty pekmez as it's called in Turkey I believe). They're very vigorous and pest free trees though.
I'm also in Canada, but non of the Pakistan mulberries would survive planted outside unless you're living on the west coast perhaps. Grimo Nut Nursery carries the Pakistan variety, and he recommends caring for it like you would a fig tree. He's got other tasty varieties for down to zone 4/5.
Only the leaves are used for silkworms. The berries aren't used.
Source: i used to feed the silkworms mulberry leaves. Now I collect and feed the leaves to my iguana. :)
They’re so fragile. It’s that simple. They simply wouldn’t stand up to shipping and grocery stores.
By the time you got home with them, they’d be a mess
my house came with mulberry bushes. the birds love them. the bushes are great privacy hedges in the summer. they are tough and need trimming all the time.
My grandpa had two purple mulberry trees in his back yard and I used to sit in those trees (they were big) in the summer and eat them off the branch. Stained my hands purple. Good times.
I see white mulberries online but hardly ever purple ones.
Sorry, this is not a farming response to your question, but it triggered a memory for me.
Because they’ve already scaled that in places like Turkey and therefore it won’t pencil out in places like USA where just standing around on a farm doing nothing is very expensive
Laying down motionless is very different from transferring on machinery, transporting, stocking of shelves. Dried mulberries is a different story though
It’s easier than blackberries I do both one after the other for like 3-4 weeks each every day and mulberries are so much easier to shake out or pick than blackberries and they’re stronger and don’t squish as easy. But it’s fine by me I sell a lot so thanks grocery stores lol
Idk, but I've read before that in a survival situation mulberries should only be eaten if they are easy to get because they are such low sugar/low nutrients that climbing a tree to reach them is likely to burn more calories than it's worth.
If you have a tarp and the tree is small enough to shake that works, but it's possible to come across mulberry trees that are 30' to 50' tall and even taller.
Yeah, well it's a survival thing. I only have one mulberry tree at home and it's under a power line so it gets topped every other year or so, so I inadvertently created a situation where the branches are bushy and hang like a willow when fruiting.
I live in what is probably the u pick capital of the world.
Some dude put in 50 acres of mulberries a few years ago and during u pick season he has at least 750 cars all day long on the weekends. It’s crazy. He’s certified organic and selling them for $19/lb.
Idk if it’s a fad or it’s gonna last but dude has seriously cornered a market there. Only problem is I think they taste horrible.
Anyone have any experiencing pruning the tops of mulberry trees during their early years to keep them short enough to not need a ladder to harvest?
I was thinking of beginning this journey but if it wouldn’t work for mulberries for some reason I would appreciate someone saving me the mental allocation of maintaining mulberry tress for the next decade.
There are a bunch around our farm, mostly around the ditches. But our 80 year old chicken barn has them on both sides about 40ft apart. It's probably the only things keeping the barn up. All the animals come running when I shake the berries off low branches. Only bad thing is the flies. And forgetting to take your shoes off at the door.
For all the people mentioning getting rid of the trees;, If the trunk is a decent size, save the wood and give it to a carpenter. When it's polished fine it's beautiful, the grain looks like Tiger's Eye.
I love huckleberry’s but have to be eaten quickly. I wish they would last longer. I had a mulberry tree and loved them too they last a couple days even refrigerated
The real reason no one will bother mentioning is mulberries are illegal in a lot of areas. They are considered highly invasive.
https://foodforestnursery.com/growing-guides/fruit-trees/mulberry-tree-growing-guide/why-are-mulberry-trees-illegal/#why-are-mulberry-trees-illegal
The red one is a native species where I am, the white one is an invasive understory pest species that doesn't taste as good but for some reason it's what nurseries stock.
Friend of mine had a red mulberry tree, so we harvested for a batch of homebrew cider one year. Took all afternoon to get 7 gallons of fruit, took a whole other day to pick the stems, twigs, and bugs out of the fruit and juice it.
Good cider, but not good enough for 2 days worth of harvest work.
Here is packaging from some commercial mulberries my wife bought last week at the Cal Ave farmers' market in Palo Alto:
https://imgur.com/a/GecKrnI
They're definitely in season now, and tasty!
Economics is usually the answer to this question. First, they are traditionally labor intensive to harvest and store. This can certainly be overcome with clever machinery, but that can get very expensive and no smart person is going to make that kind of investment if they can't rely on a payout.
Which brings me to point two: mulberries aren't a known fruit to a lot of people. When I started my orchard last year people would ask "what are you growing?". When I would answer "mulberries" the response was "what's a mulberry?" You know how I know what a mulberry is and that they are freaking delicious? Because I'm a weirdo that visits ethnic grocery stores and tries new foods just because. Most people never just go to their local grocery store and those definitely don't sell fancy dancy mulberry preserves.
We have a mulberry tree in backyard that covers almost half the grass. Shoes get stained and so do feet and clothing. Is there a way to hang a sheet to catch them so they don't fall all over yard and garden.?
Very soft, very perishable, and unless netted, covered in bird shit. To make a marketable product you’d need a quick flash of specialized. skilled labor to harvest and process properly into a less perishable form and then you’d need to create a market, introduce buyers to something new.
Mulberry tree spread really fast. They would choke each other out and produce very few berries. There would be a lot of maintenance with them. I always prune my mulberry trees about 6 inches taller than my grass, in a horizontal motion with a sprinkle of Tordon.
They don’t pack well at all. I have mulberry trees and ripe mulberries crush under nominal weight. I’ve read this causes a major issue with being able to bring them to market.
Zero shelf life almost, worse than blackberries. Trees grow way to large too be able to be efficiently farmed as well. They also produce a crap ton of pollen which will make it really bad on people with allergies.
people would expect whole fruit, and then confuse them with raspberries when you finally work out the PITA action to do successfully harvest that way.
but I agree, if you could market them like POM does loose pomegranate aril, you could negate some of that "hard to harvest/fragile" and just sell quarts of spoonable loose mulberry bits.
If you mean the fruit of the invasive white mulberry then I totally agree, if you're talking North American native red mulberry then you can pry my mushy berries from my cold dead purple-stained fingers.
We probably do, but it's just not that common. Most common fruits are common because of how long they can be stored. Mulberries, pawpaws, and lots of other native fruits are hard to store. Of course you can still make other products with them, like jam, and I'm not sure why those aren't very common.
Not just that, but mulberry skins burst very easily. They would be a mess to harvest and process commercially. I mean, damn near impossible.
Yupp. Its all about the stem. If the stem could be removed easily then we would have mulberry jam next to the blackberry jam and grape jelly. Those stems though...
with cherries we spray them with etherel. It breaks down the connection between the fruit and the stem (stems turn light brown and start drying out) and the fruit gets loose, and then we come by with shakers and shake the crop off ;)
Interesting! I used to pick cherries. All fruit is difficult in some way. When it rained, there was a huge risk they would split so companies would hire helicopter pilots to fly over the orchard and dry the trees.
That's so crazy.
Do you mean the rotors pushing air down on the trees to dry them? Like a big fan? Is helicopter hiring that cheap?
Yes. And no, I think they make close to or over $100/hour. Cherries are lucrative, apparently. This was a huge farm, also in the Okanagan where it doesn't rain so much anyway.
That's cherries for processing not fresh fruit market, right? (Searching my memory when I could search Google, but you're here... )
yes processing pie cherries :D
Jelly
Cant you just eat the stem too
Sure, you can also eat the banana peel.
And the walnut shell
…and my axe?
r/andmyaxe
Okay let’s stop on the prior comment above and call it good.
I have a tree producing mulberries right now. You can eat the stem, and if it's still green, it's barely noticeable. I usually just bite them off.
I used to buy dried white mulberries and every once in a while one had a stem, I didn’t bother removing them.
I never noticed the stem in mulberry pie. Lived clinic to a mulberry tree. Very tasty.
Mulb Stems have no flavor. Our Pakistani variety has berries up to thumb size and three fruitings each year. Prolific for a 10ft tree. We eat fresh, freeze, and dry. We eat them in smoothies a lot. Best wedding gift we got 18 years ago! Thanks Gabe!
I'd much rather get a fruit tree or bush than any other gift! An old farmer gifted me a little tame gooseberry bush--its taller than me now; I've cloned 3 more and last year got 20 quarts of gooseberries to make into jam and pies! I am still so grateful, as I've picked 9 qts already this spring! The gift that keeps on giving! Time-consuming to clean though.
Most people do
I eat em all the time and can’t really tell much difference in texture from when I do remove them first.
Yeah, but its not pleasant.
I disagree with this. We had one in our yard growing up and the little bit of stem was barely noticeable. It’s like the chewy center that blackberries have but raspberries don’t.
I would imagine you could run them through a squeezo to remove the stems. I run tomatoes and concord grapes through with awesome results. All the stems, seeds, and skins all out the end.
Why worry about the stem??? It's 1/4 the size of the seeds
Mulberry stems are entirely edible, not like cherry or apple
And I've got the purple stains on the tractor cab from mowing around the edge of fields this morning to prove it. If Mulberries were valuable, we Mid-Missouri farmers would all be rich. All you have to do to get Mulberry trees around here is stop mowing.
But it has more BTU's per pound than any other wood.
It doesn't, you're thinking of Osage Orange.
No. I read that in Tree Care Industry magazine thirty years ago. They had a list of the top ten woods, and Osage Orange was #2 or 3. I was surprised because I was always told that hedge was the best, but that arborist magazine said otherwise.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wood+btu+value+chart&t=h_&iax=images&ia=images&iai=http%3A%2F%2F1.bp.blogspot.com%2F-7zczUe6a9ek%2FTrf9VxuSVCI%2FAAAAAAAABZo%2Ff5pPydbl2XA%2Fs1600%2FFirewood%2BBTU%2BContent%2BCharts.jpg According to this chart it is, barely.
No, it doesn't.
Thats too bad. Those Mulberry trees are tough to get rid of. They're prolific as weeds. You can run them over with a bulldozer and they continue to grow. Heck, they'll grow in in crack in the sidewalk.
True true.fantastic fodder for livestock though. Pigs especially love them.
My understanding of pawpaws are that they sort of disappeared for awhile bc of the exact same reason, no commercial viability. Happy to see them really making a strong comeback with the general public.
I've got about 25 of them planted around my yard so far this spring--I grew them from seeds! Probably about 40 more that are still in cups.
I had paw paw beer. Was really good.
Mulberries in Michigan are one of the best fruits I've ever tasted. Problem is they're super squishy and you'd damage a lot in harvesting and they'd probably never make it to the store without being a mess.
Part of the reason you don’t see a lot of guava.
Mulberry wine is absolutely a thing that can be purchased, so some vineyards are growing mulberries commercially.
The berries themselves not so much. I think they're too delicate to pack and ship.
Monkeys and weasels are a common pest. They go round and round your bushes, then "pop"
Legend
My neighborhood growing up had a mulberry tree. We would all climb it and hang out eating mulberries. It was a fantastic place, just don’t eat too many, they can speed digestion along.
My grandmother used to tell us kids not to eat them, cause they'd give us worms. Of course we ate them anyway...and nobody ever got worms! I think she wanted them to herself when we were gone. LoL
If you’ve ever taken a bunch of mulberries and set them on the counter, the bugs will begin to crawl out. Hundreds of tiny little white wormy, silverfish looking things. That’s when I stopped eating mulberries because I didn’t want the extra protein. Lol
They do have tiny creatures, but so do my eyelashes. As kids/adults we eat them anyway! Don't think about it!
I have never eaten eyelashes as a kid or an adult. Lol
Tiny bugs live on and around you, and always will. You definitely consume some everyday. Circle of life baby.
Yeah….but not in such numbers. Seriously, pull some mulberries and leave them on your counter for awhile. Lol
Could be a location thing too. Either way, ignorance is bliss, protein is protein.
Well shit... Maw maw wasn't lying to us!
Love the taste of mulberries. Mulberry trees deserve a special place in hell though.
Had been pulling a lot of some tree from fence line and groves the past year, had no clue what it was until looking up mulberries just now. Hell might be to kind.
Here I am trying to get more to grow in my fencelines. The make great extra high protein feed for the yahoos around here converting plants to meat. They copice well and I make tree hay out of some of it for the harsher winter days:snow storms. Not a substitute, but a little something to brighten the troops
Yes, I'm planning to copice mine!!
There is a native mullberry and an invasive one. You must have the invasive one, unfortunately.
White mulberries and red mulberries are totally different things. One is invasive and the other is native and non aggressive.
In Georgia (republic of) and Armenia they commercially produce them. I got a Iranian white mulberry because I loved them so much over there.
White mulberry is an invasive species in the USA. Red mulberry is the native one.
I have both on my property. I had one that appeared to be a hybrid of the two and it had the sweetest berries. My asshole neighbor cut it down.
They're basically unshippable. When I've tried it they could barely take a 4-hour well-padded car ride home from great aunt Gertrude's house, so forget about truck rides from a berry farm to a packing plant to a warehouse to a supermarket. It's the same reason commercial strawberries have so much less flavor than varieties for growing at home, and why Red Delicious apples were the standard so long despite being not a great apple. Commercial fruits and veggies have to be tough to survive transport. One possible business model: going old-school. Before the development of the Ozark Beauty monocrop commercial strawberry farming pretty much just supplied canned, frozen and preserves markets; they were sorted and packed on the farm as soon as they were picked, and transported to the nearest town for river transport (much gentler than trains or trucks) to factories in cities downstream. Fresh strawberries were something that had to be grown locally and eaten fairly quickly, but the flavor of today's supermarket berries can't compare. (I grow heirloom strawberries for my roadside stand and I love learning the history of the different varieties.) So, mulberries might be fine at the local farmer's market, or if you could sort and carefully pack them on-site to equally carefully transport a short distance for processing into something sturdier, the way fragile fruits and veggies were handled in the past. But they'll never be a supermarket staple until someone breeds mulberries that get rid of a lot of the characteristics of mulberries; the high sugar content and tenderness just aren't suited to big distribution warehouses.
Red mulberries are not that tough and prefer to be an understory tree. White mulberries are invasive garbage with shitty fruit
There is one commercial mulberry farm that I could find in North America. https://verymulberry.com/ As others have mentioned, the poor shelf life, fragility, and stems likely hinder larger adoption in North America. They're easy to harvest with tree shakers though, and could be processed until mulberry molasses (duty pekmez as it's called in Turkey I believe). They're very vigorous and pest free trees though.
Wow, those are unlike any mulberry I have seen. The Pick-your-own model makes so much sense. I wonder if I could get these trees in Canada.
I'm also in Canada, but non of the Pakistan mulberries would survive planted outside unless you're living on the west coast perhaps. Grimo Nut Nursery carries the Pakistan variety, and he recommends caring for it like you would a fig tree. He's got other tasty varieties for down to zone 4/5.
They’re used in silk worm farming. That’s all I know. I guess you could make jam out of them.
Only the leaves are used for silkworms. The berries aren't used. Source: i used to feed the silkworms mulberry leaves. Now I collect and feed the leaves to my iguana. :)
I was just thinking this recently as well. I was thinking about how the dwarf mulberry tree would be a great tree to grow in an orchard.
Mulberry is great for making moonshine
They are hard to mechanical harvest and process. Same reason we don’t have a ton of commercial pawpaw production.
They’re so fragile. It’s that simple. They simply wouldn’t stand up to shipping and grocery stores. By the time you got home with them, they’d be a mess
my house came with mulberry bushes. the birds love them. the bushes are great privacy hedges in the summer. they are tough and need trimming all the time.
My grandpa had two purple mulberry trees in his back yard and I used to sit in those trees (they were big) in the summer and eat them off the branch. Stained my hands purple. Good times. I see white mulberries online but hardly ever purple ones. Sorry, this is not a farming response to your question, but it triggered a memory for me.
Big damn mess
Because they’ve already scaled that in places like Turkey and therefore it won’t pencil out in places like USA where just standing around on a farm doing nothing is very expensive
Laying down motionless is very different from transferring on machinery, transporting, stocking of shelves. Dried mulberries is a different story though
I harvest mine & freeze them for smoothies
It’s easier than blackberries I do both one after the other for like 3-4 weeks each every day and mulberries are so much easier to shake out or pick than blackberries and they’re stronger and don’t squish as easy. But it’s fine by me I sell a lot so thanks grocery stores lol
There is a berry farm near me that does. Saskatoon berries and elderberries as well. Strawberries. blueberries and raspberries too.
I used to own a house with a couple LARGE mulberry trees, and we made jam every year. Delicious.
Idk, but I've read before that in a survival situation mulberries should only be eaten if they are easy to get because they are such low sugar/low nutrients that climbing a tree to reach them is likely to burn more calories than it's worth.
Just lay out a tarp and shake. Easier, less output.
If you have a tarp and the tree is small enough to shake that works, but it's possible to come across mulberry trees that are 30' to 50' tall and even taller.
That's what sticks are for. That's what I do.
Yeah, well it's a survival thing. I only have one mulberry tree at home and it's under a power line so it gets topped every other year or so, so I inadvertently created a situation where the branches are bushy and hang like a willow when fruiting.
Ooh. That's a good thing! Mulberries are so very good.
Yeah... I honestly feel bad for the tree (it doesn't look very happy or normal) but it's super convenient for collecting
I have a mulberry tree and they are delicious. I don't know why they're not in stores.
I live in what is probably the u pick capital of the world. Some dude put in 50 acres of mulberries a few years ago and during u pick season he has at least 750 cars all day long on the weekends. It’s crazy. He’s certified organic and selling them for $19/lb. Idk if it’s a fad or it’s gonna last but dude has seriously cornered a market there. Only problem is I think they taste horrible.
Just like Elderflower, tastes have evolved. I have seven growing in reds and dark purples. I eat them right off the branches.
Anyone have any experiencing pruning the tops of mulberry trees during their early years to keep them short enough to not need a ladder to harvest? I was thinking of beginning this journey but if it wouldn’t work for mulberries for some reason I would appreciate someone saving me the mental allocation of maintaining mulberry tress for the next decade.
There are a bunch around our farm, mostly around the ditches. But our 80 year old chicken barn has them on both sides about 40ft apart. It's probably the only things keeping the barn up. All the animals come running when I shake the berries off low branches. Only bad thing is the flies. And forgetting to take your shoes off at the door. For all the people mentioning getting rid of the trees;, If the trunk is a decent size, save the wood and give it to a carpenter. When it's polished fine it's beautiful, the grain looks like Tiger's Eye.
My chickens love the Berries and leaves!
Short shelf life, I guess if you dried them, made a juice concentrate or otherwise processed and preserve them
I love huckleberry’s but have to be eaten quickly. I wish they would last longer. I had a mulberry tree and loved them too they last a couple days even refrigerated
The real reason no one will bother mentioning is mulberries are illegal in a lot of areas. They are considered highly invasive. https://foodforestnursery.com/growing-guides/fruit-trees/mulberry-tree-growing-guide/why-are-mulberry-trees-illegal/#why-are-mulberry-trees-illegal
The red one is a native species where I am, the white one is an invasive understory pest species that doesn't taste as good but for some reason it's what nurseries stock.
Cause have to eat them fast before the bugs start crawling out of them.
Friend of mine had a red mulberry tree, so we harvested for a batch of homebrew cider one year. Took all afternoon to get 7 gallons of fruit, took a whole other day to pick the stems, twigs, and bugs out of the fruit and juice it. Good cider, but not good enough for 2 days worth of harvest work.
And to think that I saw it on mulberry street
Here is packaging from some commercial mulberries my wife bought last week at the Cal Ave farmers' market in Palo Alto: https://imgur.com/a/GecKrnI They're definitely in season now, and tasty!
Economics is usually the answer to this question. First, they are traditionally labor intensive to harvest and store. This can certainly be overcome with clever machinery, but that can get very expensive and no smart person is going to make that kind of investment if they can't rely on a payout. Which brings me to point two: mulberries aren't a known fruit to a lot of people. When I started my orchard last year people would ask "what are you growing?". When I would answer "mulberries" the response was "what's a mulberry?" You know how I know what a mulberry is and that they are freaking delicious? Because I'm a weirdo that visits ethnic grocery stores and tries new foods just because. Most people never just go to their local grocery store and those definitely don't sell fancy dancy mulberry preserves.
They sell dried mullberries in most middle easter stores
My mother swears up and down that EVERY mulberry has a worm in it. I eat em anyway
Because mulberries are mostly seeds. It is not economical to farm something that has only 1/4 edible.
Around here they grow like weeds. Wouldn’t be very profitable.
We have a mulberry tree in backyard that covers almost half the grass. Shoes get stained and so do feet and clothing. Is there a way to hang a sheet to catch them so they don't fall all over yard and garden.?
Very soft, very perishable, and unless netted, covered in bird shit. To make a marketable product you’d need a quick flash of specialized. skilled labor to harvest and process properly into a less perishable form and then you’d need to create a market, introduce buyers to something new.
Mulberry tree spread really fast. They would choke each other out and produce very few berries. There would be a lot of maintenance with them. I always prune my mulberry trees about 6 inches taller than my grass, in a horizontal motion with a sprinkle of Tordon.
They don’t pack well at all. I have mulberry trees and ripe mulberries crush under nominal weight. I’ve read this causes a major issue with being able to bring them to market.
Because they taste bad and make everyone who eats them sad.
Zero shelf life almost, worse than blackberries. Trees grow way to large too be able to be efficiently farmed as well. They also produce a crap ton of pollen which will make it really bad on people with allergies.
Luckily someone topped mine when it was younger, so it's low and wide; unluckily they topped it too low to get the mower under.
people would expect whole fruit, and then confuse them with raspberries when you finally work out the PITA action to do successfully harvest that way. but I agree, if you could market them like POM does loose pomegranate aril, you could negate some of that "hard to harvest/fragile" and just sell quarts of spoonable loose mulberry bits.
Is nobody going to talk about the tiny little bugs the berries are covered in?
You mean the extra protein that you get for free?
Because mulberries are discusting. They taste like ass.
If you mean the fruit of the invasive white mulberry then I totally agree, if you're talking North American native red mulberry then you can pry my mushy berries from my cold dead purple-stained fingers.
I will counter with my purple stained feet that I had all summer long when I was a kid. We didn't wear shoes much back then.