When they were in season, we would pick the plump fruit every morning whilst jogging past the trees - us running off with stained fingers and lips.
I learnt that the reason these wonderful fruits rarely make their way to market is due to their highly perishable nature. They seem to exploded when you pick them, covering your fingers with the sweetest scarlet juice - very messy and delicious.
The mulberry tree is deciduous and goes by the Latin name Morus. In Spanish they are called Mora. The fruit go through a ripening stage, from white to green and then pink to red and then finally purple-black. The adage for mulberry fruit is, “the darker, the better.” The fruit is an aggregation of small fruits arranged together. Like a blackberry but larger and so much sweeter and juicier.
In Lanzarote they also use them to make a very sweet liquor, also called Mora - we have a bottle of it chilling in our fridge right now.
Mulberries are loaded with health benefits on account of their deep-purple hue. Dark-skinned fruits have cancer-fighting polyphenols but mulberries also have the highest level of antioxidants compared to all other dark fruit.
But be warned - the purple juice which explodes from the fruit on your fingers and clothes is quite outrageous, it will seriously stain you - but I read about a solution for this. You can rub the leaves from the mulberry tree on your hands or where it has stained your clothes and then wash it off. Hey-presto! The strain will easily fade away. I have tried this and it really works. So you see, nature provides solutions to the so-called problems created by itself, unlike us humans who only search outwardly for solutions for our own messes.
Mulberries are not in season at the moment, but I'm thinking about when next they are, and how I will fill a bowl with them with my red-dyed fingers dripping sweet, rich juice.
Both blackberry and mulberry seem to be called mora in Spanish. I haven't exactly worked it out yet and this is quite confusing for me.
So come forward now and plant this tree in your garden or allotment immediately. Apparently they do grow in the UK although but I have never seen one, despite going round-and-round an imaginary one all the time as a small child.
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