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 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.
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.
I really like all your videos and fruits but I’m much more impressed with your ability to multi-task - holding the video camera, picking the fruit, tasting and describing the flavor all the while keeping the clearly very energetic kids engaged
thank you i appreciate your comment! you forgot to add while having carrying baby on my baby carrier. you may have heard baby talking in my background noise.
I want to eco the previous comment made by californicus, very impressive!!
It is fun to see all the different mulberries you’re growing, I am so jealous!! I liked many of the videos and I subscribed .
I have two weeping white mulberry trees. One I bought from Burnt Ridge Nursery the other one is a cutting from the tree at the pool. The growth habit and look of the leaves is the same but the fruit ripens and tastes slightly different, I think It may have more to do with soil conditions then variety. I planted the trees only about 7 feet apart… But the tree I got from Burnt Ridge I dug a hole about 4 feet wide and 4 feet deep and filled it with nice topsoil. The cutting I only dug a hole about thrice the size of the pot I grew it in and back filled with black gold potting soil, I have to put nitrogen fertilizer on the cutting tree to keep the leaves green. The soil surrounding it is the existing polluted garbage soil my Grandpa brought in from an old gas station, long before my wife and I bought the house.
This year I tried rooting cuttings from scion wood I bought from
Burnt Ridge Nursery. I tried Pakistan mulberry, Illinois Ever Bearing, Sweet Lavander, Kokuso, and Black Beauty. Unfortunately none of them rooted. All of the buds were swelling looking beautiful than I came out one day and to my dismay and disgust all of the buds had been badly damaged or completely eaten off by a slugs. They never recovered after that.
I did try grafting them onto my weeping mulberry tree as Insurance and I had Illinois Ever Bearing, Black Beauty and Kokuso that took and I even got some yummy mulberries off of them this year.
I think what I’m going to do is go to Burnt Ridge nursery or One Green World and buy the biggest healthiest Pakistan tree I can get than graft other verities onto it.
Hasanyone else tried rooting the Illinois Everbearing ? They ‘look’ as if they would root easily, but I have had no luck with spring or fall cuttings…i was able to graft successfully . Separate question, …I am ordering another IE but also a fruiting ‘bush type’ is a bush type the natural form of the tree as it grows on it’s own without training ? or just a tree that has been cut back at ground level and them comes back as a bush ?
I’ve had success rooting IE summer cuttings ( July). Trying to maintain IE as a bush would be very difficult since branches can grow 6 to 8 ft in a season including horizontal branches. Gerardi is a bush form of mulberry.
May I ask how you rooted the IE cuttings ?..I like to use sand if I think something is going to be difficult to root as it has no organic matter in it to encourage rotting and also because I once read that the granular ‘feel’ of the sand next to the stem encourages rooting…but I have also tried half and half mix of sand with pearlite…or with some soil added or just sticking them in the ground in a raised box ( i successfully rooted some haskaps this way…so I thought I would try that…but no luck…
i was also reading my grafting book and the author mentioned using root cuttings for fruit trees which I thought would not be possible…so i put some root cuttings in some soil in pots and planted the pots in the ground…(just recently )
For summer rooting: Used a soilless mix. 50% perlite or coarse DE mixed with peat moss. Removed all but 1 or 2 leaves and cut them leaving only about 1 inch of leaf; growth hormone on bottom of stem. Keep in a high humidity container in shade. I use a closed clear storage container to maintain humidity. 50% rooted.
I’ve tried rooting and grafting I.E with no luck . going to try again next spring. my northrop mulberry is 7ft. tall and growing like a weed. id like to try grafting on that and my no named alba. I’ve heard the timing has to be exact for grafting. something about sap flow doesn’t allow the graft to take. anyone else hear of this?
Make a couple of near-circumferential ‘girdling’ cuts below the graft, when you make it…acts as a ‘pressure relief’ valve, of sorts.
I typically do just a simple bark graft.
Rooted cuttings of 4 cultivars, including IE, this summer. Mid-July, 50/50 mix of soilless potting mix and pinebark fines; 1 or 2 buds/cutting, leaves cut back by 1/2. Basal ends dipped in whatever rooting hormone powder I had on hand, put aplastic grocery bag over top of pot containing 20-25 cuttings, kept them in a semi shady spot on NE side of house. Got about a 10-15% success rate…but all the care they got was watering every couple of weeks. Removed the bag when live cuttings started pushing growth. Some have grown more than 1 ft.
i grafted about 20 grafts of IE onto my weeping mulberry cut back to 1/2" radius or so stumps and very little if any sap flow late in summer but im also afraid not enough moisture in the ground as you need some sap flow to make that connection work i would think ?..at least thats my perspective as i had a whole lot of apple grafts this spring that looked like they were swelling buds and about to grow but we got a drought and it never occurred to me that might cause grafts to fail just as they were about to go.
i had a successful graft of IE onto a red mulberry seedling but i think a chipmunk or red squirrel jumped on it and broke it off,it was growing great…i have another that is going great, i grafted way down low onto a side growth/sucker that came up after i cut my red mulberry seedling way back. I believe i did a “z” graft in both cases (whip graft with a cleft half way), probably not the recommended graft for mulberry as it makes a bit of a mess of the bark/cambium…but it worked. I also had some successful bud grafts I did but because the grafting “wax” i use is almost the consistency of vaseline, (not quite that soft but almost) i think it caused the buds to rot…not great for warm weather but works well in the spring. Too bad because i could see they were swelling, looked like they were gonna go.
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