Alice Liam: Dedicated Mulberry Harvester
Alice Liam with the day’s mulberry harvest
Alice Liam’s mulberry tree was a volunteer in the front of her yard, in the middle of boxwood. It took a few years for it to yield berries, but now the tree towers over her townhouse, dropping mulberries like gifts on her doorstep.
The berries used to reach peak harvest on her birthday, June 14, but “global warming makes ‘em come sooner,” Liam says. Liam today is an avid mulberry harvester, scooping up from two to three gallons to donate to the Baltimore Orchard Project for its annual Mulberry Madness event this month.
Using rubber gloves to protect her hands, she scoops up perfect mulberries from her concrete porch. The berries are red-black gems in her plastic tub.
Liam admits the berry can make a mess, turning her porch purple during the season but she finds that the fruit is sweet enough to use in recipes that call for strawberries.
For her part, Liam makes cobbler from a tried and true recipe she found in a magazine, under the title “Any fruit cobbler.” Her mulberry cobbler is in demand by neighbors and church friends. She makes it with a bit more sugar than other fruits. “I’ve been making it since forever,” Liam says.
The tree is too tall to shake in the technique used by many of the Baltimore Orchard Project volunteers. Using gloves to protect her hands from the purple stains, she scoops them from the ground and concrete porch floor within hours of their dropping.
Before the mulberries appeared, she foraged for blackberries in a field near the baseball field behind her house. Now she forages in her own front yard.
While some neighbors dislike the markings left by the mulberries on cars and sidewalk, Liam remains a fan. “It saves all kinds of money,” she said referring to the shade offered by the tree. And she likes that the berries will be used by BOP to fund orchard projects throughout the city.
