With red mulberries, you wait until they turn a dark purplish, almost black, hue. I remember them from my childhood but don't have any fruit-bearing mulberries at our place where we live now. If you harvest them and eat them red like the birds do, their flavor won't be fully developed and sweet yet, and if you eat too many red ones, they can have sort of a laxative effect on your body.

You can eat them fresh. You can dehydrate them and eat them that way or toss a handful of dehydrated berries onto a bowl of cereal or a salad, or substitute dehydrated ones for raisins in cookie recipes. You can preserve them via canning as whole berries, or by making jam or jelly out of them. The National Center for Home Food Preservation has recipes for jellying them using both powdered and liquid pectin. You probably can freeze them the same way you'd freeze blackberries but I've never tried it, so I am only guessing.

Another advantage to having a mulberry tree is that the birds should make that their first choice and not be as troublesome to any grafted fruit tree fruits.

I love to just stand outside, and eat them right of a tree. Unfortunately my mulberry tree died. :(

I work my way to the end of the garden to be rewarded with a hand full of mulberries. They are our first berry to ripen i look over the little ants that are usually on them. I guess that is a little protein with my berries.

We used to overlook the ants too, or we'd spray a handful of berries with the water hose and assume the ants were gone (they probably weren't).

I found a huge mulberry tree about a 5 minute walk from our house. I picked them daily last year while they were available. They are tasty and the darker ones are very sweet. To clean them, I soak them in water with a little bit of apple cider vinegar and then use fingernail clippers to trim off the stem. They are good in cereal and make good muffins. Maybe I made a cobbler too...can't remember.

I froze two bags last year by lining a cookie sheet with wax paper and making a single layer of the berries. Once frozen, I just put them in a ziplock. The frozen ones are good in yogurt.