At least we think they're mulberries. I kind of let my kids eat them last year without knowing what they were and figured if there were poisonous berries growing in our area I would have heard about it. Everyone survived.
Anyway, this year we are trying a lot harder at this whole homesteading thing and actually,
1) Identified what we were eating. We used Google's Pictoral Field Guide to Native Plants (known more commonly simply as "Google Images") and are fairly certain it's a mulberry tree. Incidentally, ingesting unripe mulberries or their stems or parts of the tree can cause stomach upset and hallucinations.
2) Watched a YouTube video about the proper way to harvest mulberries.
So, this year instead of hand picking each mulberry we put a tarp on the ground and shook the branches and got a rain shower of mulberries (and purple stains on our clothes).
Meanwhile, the baby girl kept herself occupied by stuffing her face with berries she picked up off the ground.
After three evenings shaking berries off the tree we totaled about 5 gallons of mulberries.
The thing about mulberries though is that they really don't taste that great. (Especially the ones you pick up off the ground. Those just taste like dirt. But my baby likes dirt. Her three favorite foods are meatballs, dirty mulberries, and sand.) And their stems are near impossible to remove in a reasonable amount of time without making a purple sticky mess. So my kids don't really eat them once we get them home (while we're picking them off the tree they think the berries are the most delicious thing ever, it's all in the novelty of standing in the ditch eating free berries).
So we had 5 gallons of mulberries, minus several small purple-stained handfuls. Which got me searching on Pinterest for uses for the mulberries, which is where I learned the proper terminology for "free-loading from trees in a ditch down the road." It's actually called 'foraging,' and it's all the rage on Pinterest. There are people that are "expert foragers," and you can even hire a "foraging guide."
Meanwhile, our distant ancestors are scratching their heads wondering why they even bothered to invent agriculture.
Real homesteading and foraging bloggers need catchy titles with numbers in them to get traffic to their posts, which means there are all sorts of blog posts about "5 Uses for Mulberries," or "8 Recipes Using Mulberries," or "12 Health Benefits of Mulberries," or "83 Reasons You Should Forage for Mulberries." But I really question these bloggers' expertise because I really don't want to serve a pie or a three-layer trifle with hallucinogenic berry stems in it to my children. And I don't think my children should be drinking mead either.
So we ended up putting the berries through the food grinder to juice them. Diluted with water and a little bit of sugar added, it makes a tasty, fairly healthy drink (after all there are 12 health benefits of mulberries, some random blogger said so).
The juice is fairly easy to make. My six-year-old did most of the work grinding the berries down. It's the cleaning up afterwards that makes you rethink this whole foraging trend.
Let's just say that G came home from work the other day to a very purple kitchen, and that we will need to re-paint some portions of our recently-painted cabinets. Unless some some homesteading blogger has pinned a post on "6 Ways to Remove Purple Berry Stains from Your Cabinets."
