whoah! mulberry is my online surname, as an explicit invite for closet-aficionados(of mulberries) to encourage them to “out themselves” and share their experiences with me, lol
We planted a mulberry tree last year without ever having eaten one solely based on the non-stop rave reviews (and purple hands) from the employees at our local nursery. We had our first mulberries a couple weeks ago and they’re amazing.
Consider me outed.
yes! we’re multiplying! i agree, mulberries are amazing. All they really need to produce buckets of fruits are: a little bit of water, and plenty of neglect. I have just enough water where am at, but to make up for it , our trees get neglect in generous quantities.
lastly, it is outright cruel to have kids and not have a mulberry tree. Nutritionally, all berries are healthy, but only mulberries are guaranteed to be pesticide-free.
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Since planting a Pakistan about two years ago,the fruit drop at the green stage.The tree is in a half whiskey barrel.I think the thing gets enough water.Maybe I should transplant into the ground. Brady
Brady I had that same issue on Pakistan planted in my greenhouse. Two trees and they both dropped the fruit. At the time I wasn’t sure what was going on. Now I realize the trees were probably more water stressed than I thought based on how the other trees reacted and produced. Trees had these great big leaves, looked good, and dropped fruit. I don’t know maybe I’m wrong.
Here are some photos of my “Black Beauty” from Willis Orchards. It was planted in April 2014, so this is its second leaf. You can’t tell from the photos, but it is 8 feet tall and very bushy. I topped it several times because I was trying to turn it into more of a bush than a tree- not sure if that was wise or not. In the photo I took to show you the bark, you can also see one thing that worries me about my tree- will it end up splitting at this fork one day? Anyway, please take a look and let me know what you think I have. Thanks.
kevin
sorry @thecityman, i really think it is not a nigra. Nigra’s leaves appear thicker and more scruffy than other species, and like the fruits, are borne relatively close to the stems, with what appear to be relatively shorter and stiff petioles and leaves(nigra’s leaves don’t appear pliable/banner-like) . Also, nigra’s tend to have a more tortuous or gnarly growth habit, and don’t grow extremely long and straight canes like the one you have–aside from growing really slow. Dwarf gerardi’s are the only alba’s i know of which could appear like nigra’s. Good thing is that gerardi’s usually fruit on the first year of planting, and its berries are borne different from nigra’s from the get-go.
of course the disclaimer-- this is not expert advice, and am quite open to have others challenge it.
in fact, i am actually hoping to be proven wrong.
may just be due to age/‘readiness’ of the plant. For three years, our black beauty mulb fruits would reach red-stage, but would (quite-painfully)drop off before they reach the dark purple color. All of them…
It was only this year that they nudged them into reaching full-ripeness, which i hope would be a trend from hereon, since they are getting bigger every year.
pakistani’s also have this annoying habit of bearing fruits quite low to the ground, even though >7 feet tall. Our specimen successfully nursed its fruits to maturity on its first year of planting, but the berries were too close to the ground, which i was fine with since it was not much more than 8" tall when acquired, but on the second year,and having bolted 7 feet, the darn thing fruited at practically the same height it fruited the previous year! Like yours and @fruitnut , all other berries at the higher rungs ended up dropping at the green stage, which was really annoying, as there are quite a few feral cats in the neighborhood which LOVE to scent-mark low-lying plants…
below is a mini documentary of our pakistani’s progress from last year to this year.
http://forum.vpaaz.org/photo/pakistan-mulberry?context=user
http://forum.vpaaz.org/photo/pakistani-mulb?context=user
Alan made me laugh again.
City,
By the look of the leaf edges, it appears you have a white mulberry (Morus Alba) or a red-white hybrid with Morus Rubus (they hybridize naturally).
I’ll be darned! I have had several mislabeled trees from big box stores, but I honestly accept that as a well known risk of buying from big box stores and do so with the attitude that if its not what the label says, I’ll accept that as a trade-off for getting, large, potted, convenient trees without shipping. But when I buy from an online nursery and go to the trouble and expense of getting a professionally grown, bare root tree shipped to me, I expect more! But we know it happens.
The big disappointment to me is not that I have the wrong tree which may have average or worse flavor, but its that I was looking so forward to learning what a “good” mulberry tastes like and why so many people like them, as opposed to the wild ones I’ve tried and do not like. Oh well. I’ll let it grow and see what happens. I can always cut it down or maybe top work it (do mulberries graft well?)
rubra/alba/and nigra could be grafted over with any of the others.
alba’s supposedly live longer than rubra’s, so should be a better rootstock option when propagating the nigras
We can in most cases determine with the red mulberry seedlings if they are male or female by the leaves. The exception To that is when the seedling is a white mulberry because like the male the leaves are more rounded.
cityman,
You’ve just got a white mulberry (M.alba); they gypped you. I fell prey to TyTy early in my career, and ordered a Black Beauty or Black Giant(it’s been 20 years ago). It’s the only TyTy plant still alive… it’s nothing but a crappy M.alba seedling with small,mostly tasteless berries. Yeah, they turn black, but they’re not a beauty or a giant. I’ve partially topworked it to other varieties, but most of it is nothing better than - and not as good as some - that one would find growing in any untended fenceline or roadside ditch in town here.
didn’t know that TyTy, despite all online feedback i have been seeing, is at least 20 yrs old and going strong…
must be the advertisements they have been posting, like this one about pakistan mulberries, replete with pizza, and the dramatic fireworks at the end of the movie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fSvjXqd9ag
anyway, i also gypped myself: here’s the ‘dwarf everbearing black mulberry’ i got from ebay(not from TyTy). I knew it wasn’t a black mulberry, but the 6$ price for the intriguing ‘curio’ was just too hard to resist. It was even potted when i received it in the mail, and that’s hard to beat, lol! Like yours, and @thecityman , it’s probably just a variant of M alba. Definitely not a dwarf, bolting up 6 feet in just a few months. Tortoises love the leaves and shoots, btw.
below is a close up of a true black mulberry, with chocolate to black colored dormant buds
next are a ‘noir de spain’ black mulberry(left), and dwarf gerardi M. alba(right), smothered with bermuda grass. On their second year, and each having grown not much more than a few inches. For reference, concrete dumbo’s rump is ~1.5 feet high. These two, along with black beauty mulberries(a M. nigra) are the veritable dwarfs of the mulberry family.
Well this just stinks!!! Overall, I’ve been pleased with Willis Orchards, and they’ve been really good about honoring their warranty. But passing of a regular mulberry as a true black is very frustrating. I was suspicious just because of its extreme growth rate- it literally grew 7 feet in the last 3 months- fastest growing tree I have. From what I’ve read, true blacks aren’t fast growers and you all have just confirmed that. So looks like I spent $20 and a lot of time on a tree that grows wild around here and doesn’t make very tasty fruit! frustrating. Very frustrating. Maybe I can beg some scion from some of you this winter/spring so I can convert this tree into a “real” one.
BTW, @Lucky_P - of topic, but I wanted to let you know that I ended up getting 2 grafted Pawnee Pecans this year and they are doing great. I know they weren’t on your “top” list for my area, but you said they were “acceptable” and better than the others I asked you about. Also, I fully intend to plant to more trees to pollinate them next spring, so I may be reaching out to you again for that. thanks for all your help on Pecans.
where are you at? If you’re in the southwest, star nursery sometimes sell sizeable specimens.
black mulberries and dwarf gerardi’s are extremely slow growers, i think it would be best you obtain actual specimens which slashes the long waiting time. Burntridgenursery sells black beauty mulberries for ~ same price as the impostor you received from willis orchards, and those from burntridge seem to be 3 or 4 yrs old already(which are still quite young, in M. nigra terms), and that should give you way more of a headstart, compared to grafting a twig , then having to wait at least 3 more years.
i already have 4 black mulberries, and they are all 3 to 4 years of age(6-8 yrs old if adding their estimated age when i obtained them), but still, am planning to buy more of them next year…due to the long wait. If i can’t speed up their growth, i will have to buy more of them to make up for the scarcity of fruiting branches
That is excellent advice @jujubemulberry. I am in Tennessee on the KY line, btw. But I hadn’t thought about the fact that grafting would take so much longer. The only grafting I’ve done has been top working large apple and pear trees, and because they were already such large trees (8-12 inch diameter) the grafts have grown incredibly fast and are likely to fruit next year if I let them (2ed year after graft!). But obviously M. Nigra’s don’t grow that fast, nor do I have such large trees to graft to. I’m certainly someone who is guilty of doing whatever I can to speed up fruit production, even if it costs me considerably more to do it. So you are right- I’ll just buy some whole trees this fall or next spring. Thanks.
Has anyone had much success grafting Mulberries?I’ve tried different varieties to various root stocks and trees and nothing yet.I sent some scions to a guy in New York and he gets them to take.Keep trying I guess. Brady
Brady,
I ruled out that they absolutely cannot be grafted dormant. Whites and reds do not appear compatable. My wild trees in some cases are part white and part red in which case I get nothing to take. So they need to be grafted with dormant scions to a non dormant tree before it’s hot outside. That tree must be compatable with the new scion . It is a tall order and I lost 100% of my grafts. I have had success growing very large hybrids so next time I will graft the crosses on the smaller berried hybrids