Pakistan Mulberry Fever

pakinstanmul

Let me just say Pakistan mulberries. Now let me say it again. Pakistan Mulberries.  Let’s all repeat that as a mantra.

What are they? The tastiest fruit in the know universe. Imagine a longish, very sweet but ever so slightly exotic tasting berry. The problem: they go bad so fast that you practically have to eat them off the tree. The other problem: we have no more room left to grow a Pakistan mulberry tree. Thankfully fruit tree guru Steve Hofvendahl sold me two small strawberry cartons full of them over the weekend.

Now I need a regular Pakistani mulberry fix. If I wanted to plant one Bay Laurel Nursery has several varieties. It’s mostly a warm climate plant but some varieties do better in lower temperatures.

Here’s what Steve had to say about his six year old tree which he thinks is the “Cooke” variety:

It has totally thrived and become huge.  I have to top back huge vertical branches every year after harvest season and tie limbs down laterally.
And the harvest goes on and on and is not easy, you cannot shake the tree without bringing down loads of green fruit and stubborn ripe berries won’t fall.  You have to hand pick and it takes about 2-3 hours of combing over the tree from all the different angles with the orchard ladder.
Then I soak ’em in a vinegar water solution and rinse and lay in flats refrigerated and finally weigh the good ones up, the not so good ones get made into delicious juice for jellies and my Jamalade with cumquats and/or habanero.
So it would probably maybe still be worth it to you but know what you are maybe getting into!

Again, the taste is so amazing that if I had the room I’d say it’s worth the hassle of harvesting.

Note from Mrs. Homegrown:  I wanted to add that the odd things about these mulberries is that they have a green stem which runs all the way through the center of the fruit, so when you eat them your sort  of scrape the fruit (drupes?) off the stem with your teeth, then discard it. Not that this is a problem–they’re delicious! I guess the stem is necessary to support their length.

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14 Comments

  1. Pingback: Pakistan Mulberry Fever | NewsSum

  2. You can just eat that stem – it has no particular taste. I often bite off the part of the stem that sticks out (the “handle”).

    I have a tree – I think a lot of the pain you’ve listed is for someone selling them. You don’t have to pick over every single berry for hours or soak them in vinegar. I just walk up to the tree with a bowl and a wide stick long enough to reach the berries, and tap on the ripe ones so they fall into the bowl. My biggest pain is keeping the birds away – they’ll clean the tree in one day, green berries and all.

  3. My mulberries are the regular one-inch kind, but they have the hard center stem, too. That is sort of a turnoff when eating them off the tree. But, I do.

    He makes jelly from peppers and mulberries? Do you have a recipe?

    By the way, I have heard that chickens love a mulberry tree in the chicken yard so they can eat what falls. Mine have a limb or three right outside their yard, and they won’t touch them. Once they hit the poopy and scratched over dirt and leaves, I won’t either.

    The limb from the neighbor’s tree grows about twenty feet over my fence and drapes to the ground, so every other year, I cut it back to the fence.

    Do all the fruits ripen at once on the Pakistan mulberry? I have to pick these over a month or more since all the fruits don’t ripen at once or even close together.

    Now, I suppose I should go out and pick what is ripe and freeze them until there is enough for jelly. Then every day for the next month!

    • No, the pakistan variety has a long season with a mix of ripe and ripening berries, just like the other smaller kinds.

  4. My entire experience with mulberries:

    When I was very small, the house we rented had a mature mulberry tree in the front yard. My only memory of that tree is that of my parents muttering about how the birds ate all the mulberries and messed up the car, which was white and sported purplish mulberry stains.

  5. I like mulberries, but I find that they’re usually filled with little green worms which completely ruins the experience for me. How can this be avoided?

    • Now, I may not be able to eat my mulberries, worms or not. If worms are eating the mulberries, I don’t know. If they are just crawling around, I would soak them in salty water and rinse well. Tomorrow, I will investigate before I pop a mulberry in my mouth.

  6. If you think the Pakistans are good, you haven’t tried the Nigra species of Mulberries yet. They blow Pakistan out the water in terms of depth of flavor. Mulberry trees get huge, and the fruit of some varieties stains like crazy, but you can keep the tree down to 12 ft by pruning every year the smaller branches. They hate having their bigger branches cut. You can also multi-graft it like I did.

  7. My husband and I were introduced to mulberries while on a trip to Turkey about 6 years ago. We actually ate WHITE mulberries there and they were super delicious! So when we returned to San Diego, we immediately went on the hunt for a white mulberry tree. The nursery man convinced us that the Pakistani mulberry was better. Now we have a tree that’s about 12 ft. tall that grows a ton of mulberries and I make jam. I’m not quite sure about the recipe yet — sometimes it’s too thick and sometimes it’s too thin. Any suggestions? If you’re nearby I’d be glad to share some with you! They’re usually ready around the beginning of June.

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