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.