i always saw the posts talking about going down rabbit holes when writing and like,, I have experienced rabbit holes, dude I followed the sources and went down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out where this one site got that Lesbian Day started by people doing a March on women’s day, some of them dressed in purple hoods (the answer is from a defunct website that states none of their sources or anything, has a buck wild bio, and a no longer working email), but the point here, is that the fact I know quite a bit about mulberry trees purely because of my story and my mum is surprising.
to clarify here I’m talking about red mulberry trees, not white ones. they grow in more tropical regions, and they ripen throughout summer and produce a shit ton of berries all the way through it. the berries ripen at different stages, so one bunch will have white ones, red ones, and fully ripe dark ones. the best way to harvest them is to put a tarp under it, to catch the ones that fall from wind and stuff, and you can accelerate that by throwing stuff at it, and overall just shaking it. I know that about harvesting because of a 5 minute video from 5 years ago talking about this, saying to put the tarp where the most berries have fallen onto the ground, to be careful with picking berries off the ground because of bugs and fermentation, and also saying a grappling hook is very effective at shaking it. I don’t know if anyone else is going to react to the grappling hook like I did, but personally I have only seen grappling hooks used in like, various shows and stuff where they use it to climb out of holes or to climb up cliffs, and seeing it used in a very nonchalant setting was very,, strange? but. it makes perfect sense. and anyway, he talks about how trees, even like, 3 metres apart, will taste different, and to taste them to see which ones sweeter, or just have a taste you want for you tart or something. (there’s a comment on that video saying “I’d be more worried about your dirty fingernails than fermentation” which is like,, why are you coming after him like that, and secondly that doesn’t even make sense, because uh,, unless you’re scratching the berries your finger nails won’t affect them, and even if you did, fermentation is a lot quicker than bacteria spreading, so,,,)
but I’m not done yet. I have more. mulberry trees are banned in,, I believe it’s various states in the U.S.? because they have shallow roots that make a yard hard to walk around in, mess up side walks, sewer systems, and also because male mulberry trees produce a shit ton of pollen, and for people with allergies that’s hellfire. but wait. I know even more about mulberries. in china, a long time ago, they had elephants. around this time they were trading a lot of silk, and for that you need silk worms. and silk works need to eat, and what do they eat? only mulberry leaves. a lot of them, too. so to make silk, you needed a lot of mulberry trees. so they would cut down forests, and plant mulberry trees there, to make silk. so over time elephants didn’t have a habitat there to live, so they migrated down south, to like, the Vietnam area, which is why they have elephants now.
also also also, information on mulberries that I could find was inconsistent on how old they had to be to bear fruit (which could be mainly due to climates, for example maybe warmer climates make it quicker to bear fruit, something like that) and how long they lasted. on how old they had to be to bear fruit it varied from 2-10 years depending on source, and for how old they could get, they said anywhere from 25-75 years, depending on pruning, water, diseases, etc. so. yeah. mulberry trees my guy. also for me there are giant gaps between the paragraphs, so. who knows why that is, thanks hell site I guess.
