Illinois Everbearing Mulberry

I’m sure wild ones taste different in other locations, but the wild ones here are pretty pitiful. If you really want a mulberry I would buy a named one. Vastly better in my opinion.

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IE has a very good flavor, with good sweet/tart balance, and bears heavily, over a 6-8 wk period, here.
Better, by far, in all respects, than most ‘wild’ M.alba trees I’ve encountered, and bear more heavily than any M.rubra. But, I have several random hybrids that I’ve collected - including one that popped up in the orchard here, presumably an IE seedling, that rival IE for flavor and productivity.

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Thats all i needed to know. Ill be buying one of thesr next spring!

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I have 2 of those. They are good. :slight_smile:
Have a few other even better for my taste, dunno if you can get them there in the states

Performance of specific varieties will vary from place to place…Wellington sucks here, Collier was no great shakes but they’re well-respected elsewhere. I prefer Silk Hope to any others I’ve grown.

Gelso Nero so far is my favourtie behind morus nigra which is the best

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Sorry to be a bummer, but I am planning on removing my Illinois everbearing mulberry. It just keeps growing to big and is shading everything around it. I could deal with that but I never get any fruit as the birds eat them before I get to them. Mine is such a fast grower it requires pruning weekly or it takes over like a boss.

I had grafted a Pakistan mulberry which is doing well so I’ll stick with that.

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Jim, when are you planning to do this? id be interested in some cuttings to graft and try to root if you’d be interested in sharing.

I can wait till spring to cut it down so that I can make some cutting when domant for you and anyone else who might want some… there should be plenty. Not a problem at all.

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Growth rate is amazing. I also constantly prune mine. My neighbor has chickens so I give him the 6 ft cuttings and the chickens eat them. The fruit is very good but the gray cat birds eat it most of it.

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Catbirds are unstoppable.

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I have bird netting over my blueberries and for a month the catbirds have been bouncing on the netting trying to get in. They never give up. They ate all my honeybreries, cherries, gooseberries and black currants this year. Last year I had resident hawks so it wasn’t so bad.

Catbirds lol! Do cats fly in your part of the world :slight_smile:
Just joking :slight_smile:

Had to look online, north American bird. We don’t have them in Europe

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or in n. Maine. crows are our biggest culprit here.

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Illinois Everbearing was a great berry for me until it was infected with popcorn disease. My tree is about 25 year old and 30 feet tall and across. It bears huge crops for at least 2 months. Berries are about 1 inch by 1/2 inch in size with great flavor. Unfortunately, mulberry popcorn disease renders about 99% inedible. I need to establish some other varieties that are resistant. I had one scion of silk hope growing well until something chewed it up and ripped it down. There are so many wild albas here that the birds cannot eat them all. Seedlings come up everywhere, but berries are mostly small and almost tasteless.

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I thought anyone living nearby might enjoy visiting an awesome large weeping white mulberry tree. It is on the grounds of the Tukwila public pool.

4414 S 144th St
Tukwila WA 98168
United States

As you walk to the front door it is on your right. It has a lot of delicious ripe fruit right now. The red berries are more tart and taste kind of like a ripe blackberry, the black ones are very sweet with almost no tartness. There is no male tree nearby so the berries are seedless. Be careful though the juice will stain your clothes and fingers.

One of the mulberry trees in my yard is a cutting from that tree.

I hope you guys visit the tree and enjoy!

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i google street view to see the weeping tree im far im in renton so its nice to see on google maps!

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I stopped by and snapped a picture of the mulberry tree at the Tukwila Pool. I asked the young man who was walking by to stand by the tree for perspective he said he was 5’8" tall. He had never heard of mulberries before and now he really enjoys them.
Something nice about this particular tree is the fruit doesn’t tend to fall off till it has dried out. They are still very tasty when dry and you don’t get juice on your feet as you walk around the tree.

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i rarely see any mulberries here in our area so it is nice to see a mature local tree. The non staining is always a plus. i usually dont have enough to eat the birds tend to be quicker than I am.

What mulberries do you have? The weeping variety from the pool is nice because if you look at the tree from the outside you don’t really see any berries. It’s not until you get inside the tree that you see all the abundant fruit, so I think a lot of the birds don’t notice any berries. Plus the downward facing branches probably make it hard for them to perch and feed. The berries are small only about 3/8 of an inch wide and 3/4 of an inch long, but the tree is literally covered in berries if you get under the branches. I think if someone were to put down some plastic and just shake some of the branches it wouldn’t take any time at all and you would have a 5 gallon bucket full of berries, and still leave plenty of other berries for anybody else who comes along.

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