got mulberries?

The nursery rhyme I learned was "Here we go 'round the mulberry bush..." I always thought mulberries grew on bushes but then I moved to Nebraska. Here in the Great Plains, we have mulberry trees and they grow like weeds. If there is one within a mile of your home, you will have mulberries...and the birds spread them so quickly that you would be hard-pressed NOT to find one every mile. I started reading here and was not surprised to learn that the red or American mulberry is native to the Eastern U.S. from Massachusets to Kansas and down to the gulf coast and that the white mulberry, while introduced, naturalized along with the red mulberry.

Those mulberry bushes they talked about in the nursery rhyme are black mulberries, which are the sweetest, but are not cold-hardy nor do they do well in humid climates so it's no wonder I've never seen one. When I started reading, I thought we had white and red mulberry trees. I may be wrong. I really don't know which we have because the color of the fruit does not determine the species. The white mulberry has white buds and can produce varying colored fruits from white to purple. Technically these are not berries but collective (aka multiple, aka aggregate) fruits, formed from a mass of flowers. Started from seed, they can take up to ten years to produce (wow!)

The "berries" are deliciously sweet-tart and my kids eat them for hours through late spring and early summer because they have an extended harvest period. It's difficult to convince the little ones to just pick the purple ones, though. They seem to prefer the tart taste of the not-quite ripe red ones. While I like the fact that two of our trees produce non-staining white fruits, they are sweet and lacking in that tartness, so the kids don't go after them. We collected a whole bunch of them two years ago and froze them in quart bags, adding them to smoothies and oatmeal throughout the winter. We just ate them out of hand last year and this year I have to admit that I've only tasted them a few times. The mosquitoes have been so terrible and I have a baby so we're not out as much as I'd like.

My husband keeps saying that he wants to make mulberry wine, but we've never taken a sheet out and shaken the trees to harvest a great quantity at once. I guess we take them for granted; putting our effort in trying to grow other things when we should be harvesting from these native trees that produce abundantly and without any special intervention. Silly of us, isn't it?

FYI: "Wildman" Steve Brill has some info here that I'll be using to try and determine what kind of mulberries we actually have, just because I'm curious. There are still a ton on the trees and there are many yet to ripen so we have time to get a good harvest in, yet.