Last night deer ate almost every leaf off my young mulberry tree will it recover?
It’s a air-layer I took last year an planted in ground 2 weeks ago.
I’m going to put a cage around it.
This is before an after deer stripped it
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It has a few leaves left… i bet it will recover.
Better get that fence up soon… they will be back.
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Yes it will recover/regrow.
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While waiting for the fence you might want to spray it with Chili or Cayenne pepper tea.
Four level tablespoons ground peppers per gallon. Get it cheap at Sam’s Club. Get about 2/3 glass tumbler of water very hot to boiling, pour over the peppers placed in a coffee filter and form over your glass.
Let cool. Add a few drops of dishwashing liquid. I like Dr. Bronner’s because it’s extra sticky. Fill out the rest of your sprayer with plain water.
Consider adding Surround, or whatever soluble fert you wish to the concoction. Agitate good and spray. Reapply after a couple of weeks or rain.
You might want to spritz the non-edible plants at their entryway to the garden. You want them to get the idea that there’s nothing good in your backyard.
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I concur. It’s got leaves. It’ll bounce back.
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I would encourage you to also put a trunk guard around the trunk. Rabbits will find it eventually also and gerd the trunk. 
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I had the same problem this year. A small mulberry that lived through a late freeze and then the deer ate it down until it looked like yours. Recent photo:
(yeah, I know. I’ve treated it with iron tone )
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I had the same problem and used Plantskydd. The liquid form for leaves. Spray trunk to keep rabbits away. It’s bovine and. swine blood. It works extremely well. The deer stayed away. The blood tells them a kill is nearby. They may be next! They have yet to come back. Not needed this year.
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FWIW, in a long growing season like ours, one local grower experimented with stripping all the leaves of a Pakistan Mulberry in summer. It leafed out with a second crop of fruit that ripened in the fall. I am curious if your tree does that as well!
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Thanks everyone i appreciate all the advice ill update this thread with how the tree recovers
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Oh, shoot! Are you sure it was deer and not a groundhog? The local groundhog has been pounding my mulberry and the damage looks exactly like that. I think I’ve managed to slide it down enough to give my tree a chance, but I have yet to find a deterrent that works all the time.
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We do worse than that to a tree when grafting it. It will be fine. Make sure and water it good.
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I’m in East Texas. 8a
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Mulberries are weedy and tenacious. It could have been razed to the ground and will come back. The fact that it is air layered means you don’t have to worry about a graft union.
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Deer LOVE mulberry leaves…… they must be tasty to other critters too….
This is another tree in this picture but this was my solution
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Had the same happen to my trees. One got stripped clean, even the buds, the other got stripped, regrew its leaves, got stripped again, regrew, and got stripped a third time before I got a barrier up around the poor thing.
And yet, they’ve both bounced back very well. I have been mindful of giving them small amounts of fertilizer often, and keeping them well watered, which surely helped. The one that was eaten down three times is still happy enough to be trying to put out fruit, so now I’m going to have mulberries ripening in late July or early August…
Mulberries are really tough, especially if they have a good site, plenty of sun, water, and fertilizer. But get some kind of fence up, because eventually the deer will kill them.
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You too, huh. My ukrainian giant and one kokuso were stripped in the last 2 nights. lais·sez-faire only works to a point it seems
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Hmm, that’s a fun way to frame it, especially since it promotes all kinds of responses that I normally wouldn’t have thought about. Like, a more classical conservative response might be, but is it lassez faire, if the government is artificially preventing me from controlling the deer population during the early growing season when I most need that ability. The populist conservative would probably complain about my lack of fencing along the property border. A more Stephen Pinker type response would be, it is not the surplus of deer that’s the issue, it’s the scarcity of mulberries in my backyard. Not sure what the left-side of the political isle response would be, since you can’t exactly print mulberry leaves… 
That being said, I was surprised how little deterrence I ended up needing: a single line of string, about three to four feet away all around, has kept them off my trees for nearly a month now.
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