Mobina Baseer, right, pauses while picking mulberries with her extended family. Another multigenerational family, above, organizes its harvest. The group includes, from left, Vita Chen, Michelle Ho, Ezra Jiang and Eddie Jiang.
Godhwani invited over friends and neighbors like Sadana to sample and enjoy the fruit. “They were either missing it or they were trying it for the first time,” he says. “Each year I would start getting calls in April or May, saying, ‘Are they here yet?’ I realized that people don’t really do that unless they really love something.” A mulberry farm takes root In 2018, Godhwani started the farm after purchasing about 90 acres in Brentwood. His brother and Sadana joined him, and the first set of trees was planted in 2020. Additional trees rolled out over the years, and that first tree in Godhwani’s backyard provided more than just inspiration. “The DNA from that tree is remarkable,” Sadana says. “Most of our trees in the year 2020 came from that one, and then after that we have done grafting from those trees.” Today, Habitera Farms grows two varieties of Himalayan mulberries—white and purple, with the dark fruit occupying all but about 1 acre of the ground in production. Himalayan mulberries also are called Pakistan mulberries. Mulberry is a fast-growing tree but takes three or four years to generate a substantive crop, Godhwani says. One tree can produce up to a few hundred pounds of mulberries each season, which typically runs from late spring through June in California. At Habitera, trees are kept at a reasonable height for ease of harvest. The farm tried nearly a dozen picking and
catching harvest practices before locking into the current system, which relies partly on a mobile cart loosely modeled after a “rehri” cart. In India, produce sellers push the rolling wooden carts through neighborhoods. To harvest mulberries at Habitera, workers gently shake a limb or the tree to free the ripe fruit. Berries fall onto fine mesh nets attached to the carts. Picking for generations In 2023, Habitera opened up for U-pick for the first time, inviting visitors to snag ripe berries from lower branches of trees. Brentwood, located in the East Bay of the greater Bay Area, has a tradition of U-pick and dozens of farms that participate every year. Habitera visitors have ranged from toddlers to a 100-year-old great-grandmother who remembered climbing a mulberry tree in China in the 1930s. More than a few groups have spanned several generations— like Michelle Ho and her extended family. “Our family usually just does blueberries but since the grandparents were here, we wanted to take them to pick something unique,” she says. The children “were very excited as well since there’s no other fruit picking like mulberries. ... We took home as many as we could.” That’s just what Godhwani loves to hear. “Our goal is to introduce mulberries to America,” he says. “We think the market will grow not just in Silicon Valley and California, but all over the United States.”
Cyndee Fontana-Ott cbmagazine@californiabountiful.com
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