I have never seen a male flower on any mulberries. All my fruit is seedless. I was kinda hoping I had a male nigra. As I too enjoy breeding. I have the first ever primocane fruiting purple raspberry. I can’t take credit for it though. It was a volunteer. Still very amazing what can happen in one’s garden. Mother Nature letting me know she’s the ultimate breeder. The fruit is excellent. Tastes like a sweeter boysenberry. Yet is very winter hardy unlike boysenberries.
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Thank you for sharing these photos @Tana! The few times I’ve visited mature fruiting black mulberries in the United States, they’ve always had seedless fruit and 100% female flowers. It sounds like maybe the population of trees in your area is much more diverse than the ones that have been imported to the United States. Which is, of course, no surprise.
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I read a study on growing M. nigra from seed a couple years ago. Many of the seedlings produced both male and female flowers on the same plant. It seems that not all mulberries species treat gender the same way.
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But apparently most US nurseries treat all nigras the same in selecting only pure females.
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Yes mulberries are known for converting at times. My seedling comes from an old tree in zone 7 in Bulgaria. Stories about the old tree were interesting. . Apparently it caught a fungal disease and the tree produced some male flowers. Hence my seed. No other mulberry trees within fifty miles of this one. So I have close to a clone of the tree. It often snows there. It’s very hardy for a nigra. I have seen snow covered pictures of the massive mother tree at least 100 years old if not longer.
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Polyploidy is associated with plants that are dioecious when diploid and can be monoecious when high levels of ploidy are involved. Persimmon is a good case in point. Mulberry seems to have the same paradigm with alba and rubra both showing separate sexes and nigra showing single plants with both sexes.
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If you want to read up on the hardiness of the Slovak nigra population google translate this , just scrool down below the table with chromosome #s. It should be greater than in Bulgarian mountain regions.
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Tana, may I request some seed saved from your black mulberries? I would love to grow a few of them to see how they differ from other blacks here in the U.S.
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PM me. They should be ripening around the end of August unless the summer gets wet&cool.
For any others hoping to do this “above board,” so to speak, I just did my first PPQ 587 form and it’s actually really easy to do and mine was auto-granted within an hour of sending in the application. Look at the “small lots of seed” requirements here:
One of their inspection facilities is here in Seattle, so I can just pick up seeds from them once they are inspected.
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A good read, they sound as hardy as the Bulgarian example. I’m just in the edge a touch too cold in 6b.
I learned from reading the article that air layering will work. Good to know. Think I’ll try it. It would be great to get examples as I have what I have. No more. I sorta would like to try a rubra nigra cross. But I don’t have any males and I would need a male rubra tree so I can mutate it’s ploidy level to match Nigra.
I don’t know much about manipulating ploidy, but I’ve only heard of doubling with chemicals, I don’t know how you could make it 11x larger.
It’s a matter of dosage. You can treat multiple times. I would need young plants and a fully equipped lab to do it easily.thats not going to happen.
Crisper technology may be a better approach where you could insert genes needed in one.attempt. Crisper gmos are actually easy to do at home. People are doing it already. One could insert parts of the rubra genome directly into nigra. Grow out via tissue culture. Which can be done at home too.
I’m a med tech and lab tech. I worked for MSU and also Sparrow hospital. I’m trained in creating tissue cultures for bacteria, fungi, and viruses. I have done mostly cancer research but have the skill set to work with any material. One of the coolest things I did was finding a way to grow out newly discovered organisms. Like I worked on finding a growth medium for the HIV virus. I have mostly worked with deadly pathogens so solving a ploidy level problem would be a lot of fun. Wish I still access to a good lab. It was very scary working with pathogens. Another lab beat us at developing a growth medium for HIV, still it was very cool work. I learned a lot.even though we failed. I mostly worked at keeping our biological samples alive. Like we had a large collection of sub species of the tb bacterium. About 60 strains. One person in my lab lost an eye when she touched her face. I still to this day retired 20 years from that job, do not touch my face with my hands. Old habits die hard.
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In general, you don’t necessarily need the pollen parent to match the ploidy of the seed parent. If preserving fertility in the offspring is important then you primarily need to make sure the offspring end up with an even number for ploidy. Since mulberries set fruit even without pollination, it may not even be important for the hybrid offspring to be fertile unless you want to breed an F2 generation.
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I’ve noticed this on one of my stunted nigra seedlings. All the rest (stunted and normal) have regular heart-shaped leaves like the parent tree in my posts above.
The next nigra (presumably it’s clone) is ~120m away. I have albas growing ~30 and 100m from it and my neighbour has a Pendula (likely non- hybrid alba) ~35m away. Nothing else within 250m.
I don’t know of any fig-leaved nigra in the area. All old trees I’ve found around have heart-shaped leaves.
Ideas?
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Something in the genetics of the parents, a recessive trait hat came out? Now you know how I am thinking with my seedlings. A quarter of my seedlings are different from the rest in leaf shape. Did your nigra pollinate itself to make seeds? I would think it had to if you didn’t have any trees near it.
Blockquote Since mulberries set fruit even without pollination
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I didn’t know that. So you can still get fruit from a female mulberry even without pollination. Does it have any effect on the taste? Is it possible to tell the difference between a male and a female mulberry tree prior to flowering? As a seedling?
Only if you have access to a genetics testing lab, I’d guess.
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It is possible. We know nothing about how the source tree (one that mine was layered from) was propagated as it is 100+ years old. But I’ve also read that some nigras show thiese kind of lobed leaves on “vigorous summer growth”. Which would explain why all the leaves were normal(read heart shaped)on all my seedlings up until 2 weeks ago. So I will see what they push out in spring , if they make it through the winter.
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I don’t know, if it works like with PVA persimmons (likely not), but the texture is different. With no pollination,there is no crunch - the fruit is seedless. Trees with both male and female flowers produce fruit full of seeds, while the fruit of pollinated females is a little smoother.