Purchased a repo house last fall and decided to put off the landscaping till I find out what is growing here. This tree is over 40 feet tall and full of berries, but unsure of what kind of berries they are and if they serve a purpose. If they are a good fruit I will not cut down the tree, they seem to be an ant magnet but it is far enough away from the house to create a problem. Please let me know if these berries can be harvested.
Looks like mulberry--someone else will probably be able to tell you which kind. As far as I know they're all edible, although some will have better flavor than others so you'd probably have to taste yours to see if you think it's a good fruit or not.
Thank you, it looks like a mulberry sounds good to me. Anything you can eat is a keeper in this household. Now I need to search for recipes.
That is distinctly an Asian Mulberry or White Mulberry (Morus alba), an extremely prolific fruiter but just as pernicious an invasive species. The fruit are absolutely edible, by people as well as other wildlife - especially birds.
You will enjoy the purplish deposits that are made regularly as the fruit ripen (seems to always be on the whitest surfaces), and then the exuberant production of seedlings in the most out-of-the-way and inconvenient places.
You can make wonderful preserves and pies from these guys.
If one fancies the flavors of mulberries, I'd look for the native Morus rubra which can fruit just as prolifically but doesn't seem to have quite the capacity for germinating everywhere the seeds land after "processing".
Those mulberry trees pop up all over my yard and the original tree has been gone for over 20 years. They have a tap root that reaches Satan's house. If you don't get the root, they just come back.
