The mulberry challenge

There are a lot of mulberry trees in our village. Many of the streets are lined with them. Southern Bulgaria is a great place for mulberries. There was, decades ago, a thriving silkworm business in this part of the country, thanks to suitability of the climate for mulberry growth (Silkworms eat exclusively mulberry leaves. Weird creatures.)

There are three mulberry trees along the road by our house. There’s one in our garden, too, although it’s more a tree-like bush than a single tree. Nobody planted it. It just popped out and grew. It doesn’t make much fruit but it does make a nice enough shade. If we want to eat mulberries, we just open the gate and take a dozen steps to the nearest outside tree.

And then there was this:

This mulberry formation had chosen to grow in an unfortunate place, smack in the middle of our veggie beds.

Of course, you could argue that it was us who made the beds where the mulberry grew but this is not a TV debate between Nature Lovers and Nature Haters, so there. Also, that was the best place for the beds with fewer weeds than other parts of the garden. Or so we thought.

Anyway, the reason it had become a formation rather than anything resembling a regular mulberry bush or tree was Cris’s diligent trimming of the aspiring branches twice every year along with the surrounding grass. We thought this would kill it. My, were we naive.

Pictured above is a snapshot from the early stages of the mulberry extraction. We have a rule in our family: he or she who has had enough of something is the one who does something about it, age and upper body strength permitting. So it was Irina who started the extraction. Despite the bone try soil.

Most of this early work involved exposing all the major roots and it’s fair to say they were impressive, in both size and sturdiness. A large amount of soil had to be excavated to get to them and it didn’t help the work that Vlad decided — as any cat worth the name would — that the pile of soil is his new lavatory. On the other hand, the bonus smell helped speed up the excavation process.

Gender equality is all very well but its proponents often ignore some basic biological differences between the two sexes, such as muscle mass and the aforementioned upper body strength.

Irina was perfectly capable of digging around some roots and even sawing through a couple. Wielding an axe, however, she cannot, unless it’s the small axe, which wouldn’t work on the upper part of the formation and that had to be chopped up so we could dig out more of the roots.

So at this point Cris came with the big axe. Then he brought the big hoe and got to work, chopping the upper mass of matter and exposing more of the roots and trying to loosen them, during which process the hoe’s thick, time-hardened handle broke. But the roots did loosen.

From that point onwards, it was a matter of a few hours to dig out the rest of the soil and discover yet another root, growing straight down. The rain, better late than never, helped. Vlad did not help.

Eventually, the day of final reckoning came. Cutting the final root was easy since it was a lot thinner than the monstrosities growing in all directions and the last remains of the formation came free.

The bad news? There will be Chapter 2 in our mulberry saga. Those roots can grow really long. We are considering hiring a bulldozer to save time and our backs.