Johnny "Mulberry Seed"

I grew up hearing the folk legend about Johnny Appleseed, a man who traveled across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and even into Canada planting apple trees.  I like to plant trees.  In fact, I dug up a bunch of live oak trees that were growing in the flower beds and put them in pots.  We'll plant them strategically after they've grown bigger.  

In the late afternoon, we've been over the fence on the property that borders ours.  There's a little patch of woods and I've been checking out the dewberries growing along the woods.  Dewberries, in my opinion, are even better than blackberries.  They are sweeter and more plump.  

Dewberries in almost every stage, from green to almost ripe

Dewberries, when ripened are soft and can burst in your hand, staining your fingers purple.  

We like to go out to the woods with cups and pick dewberries, eating a few, but bringing most inside.  I've been thinking about how good a warm dewberry cobbler with ice cream on top would taste!  We've been enjoying them for breakfast blended with bananas and honey in a goatmilk kefir smoothie.

But back to Johnny Appleseed.  While walking in the woods picking dewberries, a young tree caught my eye.  I had been watching it for a couple of years.  It is the tree you see below leaning over our fence from the neighboring property.  It is leaning way over to try to get some sunlight.  The privet, Chinaberry, and Chinese tallow trees all compete for sunlight in that little stretch of woods.

I had my suspicions of this tree for a while now.  The leaves almost confirmed its identity, but I needed one more thing to confirm my suspicions - fruit.  And there it was.  Mulberries!  You can see the ripening berries below.

So here is the story behind the mulberry tree.  A few years ago, a milk customer would always bring us big bowls of blackberries that he picked.  They were delicious.  He would even bring some to a friend of his in Oberlin that made Blackberry wine.  Well, one day he brought me a tall cup full of mulberries.  He instructed me not to eat them, but instead, to go back in the woods and scatter them so that they would grow.  That's exactly what I did.  (Well, I DID eat a few of them.)

I remember as a kid, my grandma and grandpa had a big mulberry tree that bordered their property.  We would eat those mulberries until we couldn't eat any more.  Our hands were stained purple and so were our shirts and lips and tongue.  The birds loved mulberries, too, and they would make quite a mess around the mulberry tree.  

Anyway, the mulberry tree that is now growing is in the general location of where I scattered them several years ago.  I was happy to see success in the mulberry propagation project.  

There's a nice, ripe, purple one.  I'm gonna get it before the birds have a chance to eat it.  There aren't very many mulberries on the little tree yet, but we look forward to future years as the little tree continues to grow.  I'm so glad that I didn't eat that cup of mulberries, but planted most of them.  Good things come to those who wait, I guess.  Johnny Appleseed would be proud.

Planting Trees

This past week I read a neat little story that was only 4,000 words long.  It was called, "The Man Who Planted Trees."  It was written by a French writer named Jean Giono and was published back in 1953.  I highly recommend reading it.  You can read the pdf version BY CLICKING HERE.

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It is about a man in 1913 who is walking through the Alps and walks into an area that is dry, desolate and uninhabited.  There is no water.  The hiker finally finds a well, but it is dry.  He stumbles across a shepherd who saves him by taking him to a spring.  The hiker stays with the shepherd for a while and observes him collecting acorns, sorting them meticulously.

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He curiously follows him and discovers that the widowed shepherd has taken it upon himself to restore the desolate valley by reforesting it - one tree at a time, even though the land does not belong to him.  He travels for miles, using his walking stick to press holes into the earth, dropping an acorn in the hole and then repeating time after time after time.  The hiker is impressed by the man's resolve and lofty goal.

The hiker leaves, fights in the first World War and returns seven years later to find thousands and thousands of saplings.  The valley is well on it's way to being restored.  Once dried streams are beginning to flow and the shepherd has gotten rid of his sheep and is now keeping bees to help pollinate the land.

The old man planted trees for 40 years!  Over the course of time this once barren landscape had become lush, vibrant, and alive.  People saw the beauty of the land and over 10,000 people moved in to populate the beautiful valley that the old man has singlehandedly transformed.

I had just read that story, when a gentleman came by the house the other day and began telling me about all the different beautiful birds he's been seeing at his house - birds like scarlet tanagers, Baltimore Orioles, and indigo buntings.  I told him I never see those birds and asked him how he gets those colorful birds to go to his house?

His answer?  He said, "I'll bring you the secret next week."  So this afternoon the gentleman drove up to the house and got out of his pickup truck with a Tupperware container and handed it to me.  It looked like it was filled with blackberries, but they weren't blackberries - they were mulberries.  He told me that those birds return to his house every year and eat the fruit from his mulberry trees.  He told me to go back in the woods behind the house and sprinkle the mulberries around.  If I'm patient, he said, I'll have mulberry trees bearing fruit in about 5 years attracting birds and making enough for us to eat as well.  I can remember that my grandmother and grandfather had a mulberry tree in the back of their house and have good memories of eating the fruit and staining my hands and mouth with the purple juice when I picked and ate them.

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Will my mulberry trees transform the land the way the old shepherd did in the book I described earlier?  Perhaps not.  But in a little way, maybe I can be "the man who planted trees," and those trees will grow and bear fruit and bring a little more happiness to us (and some pretty songbirds as well).