@murky … i actually prefer round for all… but those require more bending shaping… so the square ones are just easier…one bend in one place, faster to make.
Some of my fruit trees have round cages.
I use my ginseng hoe handle… about 3 ft long… for extra leverage. I basically step on the panel section and insert my hoe handel just right and use it to leverage my bending power.
It does not take too long to get a decent 90 degree bend.
Be careful! One can end up in the emergency room bending cattle panels. Has happened here.
@northwoodswis4 … I am 62 now… soon to be 63. It is not as easy as it used to be.
I am finding that this year (now that I am officially retired) I need to break things like planting a fruit tree down into a few steps and spread that out over a couple days.
Day 1… choose location, clear sod, start on the hole… may even finish the hole if digging is ok.
Day2… water the tree good, collect the compost, fertilizer… plant it… compost it, fertilize it, wood chip it, cage it.
I can push my old muscles and joints too much if I try to do all that in one day.
My son in law is removing a bunch of fence at his place… and we have made a couple tree cages from it. It works well. It is much smaller guage than cattle panel… is easy to bend into a circle cage… and the holes in the cage are about 2 inch x 3 inch.
He has chickens… they love to get in mulch and scratch it all over the place. Any fruit tree you want to retain mulch around… has to be caged.
why i dont free range my birds. with all the woodchips i put every spring , my yard would look like ft. knox!
big tree “rubra” (likely an alba cross) gave me a pint or so this year and they were good. I have two smaller trees not making berry yet. they put on an impressive amount of green growth this year.
I would love to be warm enough to grow nigra varieties as they look tastier, but alas the winter is very cold
My full collection of Mulberries… so far.
Gerardi dwarf mulberry…Grafted 3 springs ago. Producing excellent fruit now.
Silk Hope… in year 2 now… been a shy producer so far but berries this year were very good.
Oscar… started this spring.
Lawson Dawson… grafted late spring this year. Planted 3-4 weeks ago. Has been tipped and will send out scaffold branches soon.
Kip Parker… grafted late this spring… planted just recently.
Thas it for now…
TNHunter
Beautiful mulberry park @TNHunter. All that’s missing is an M. nigra 
. You have space…a lot of it…
Gerardi, planted in the winter. Three months ago, it was eaten to the ground by deer, but it has come back rapidly:
My new Gerardi, just put in the ground this week. You can see a Silk Hope on its fourth leaf in the background:
Here is another Silk Hope (this one on its second leaf). Silk Hope, to my taste, makes delicious fruit – like a smooth blackberry. I wish I could put in an IE for comparison, but I am apprehensive about IE because I don’t want to introduce popcorn disease:
Varaha, planted last summer. It was also eaten to the ground by deer earlier this season, who wrecked the caging to get at it. Varaha gets top marks from deer:
Oscar, planted in fall/winter of last year. The deer made a valiant effort to get to it, but could only tear off a few branches. My Oscar is not so well-branched as @TNHunter 's and I might cut it short this winter to work on structure:
As for nigras, after trying for years to get one from nurseries of ill repute and Etsy sellers (and getting scammed), I finally got two King James and a Noir of Spain last year from Lucille Whitman, who warned me that they would not do well in the South. The Noir de Spain promptly got a fungal infection and died, but the two King James are doing relatively better, especially since I started spraying them with fungicide.
I had to amputate a good chunk of this one after it got a fungal infection:
The second one is planted in an inferior location (shaded by the woods line throughout the morning) but oddly enough, has been doing better. It fruited this year, too, but the birds ate the fruit before it was ripe:
The M. nigras are very slow-growing – much slower than say, Gerardi. I’m hoping that once they’ve gotten well-established, they will become more rugged and I can ease off the fungicide treatments.
I have some more mulberries – mainly mislabeled trees sold as nigras but actually not – that were caged and put in the woods for wildlife (other than deer).
@Martin … I see you are in North GA… I am in southern TN.
Strudledog on youtube was my first introduction to gerardi… he is in North GA as well… and gerardi grows very well for him too.
For me… my first year bark grafts 4 of them 2 buds each… each bud grew near 6 ft tall that first season.
I may end up duplicating 3 or 4 gerardi at our new home site. They are just so easy, so pretty and healthy…and so good.
Nice mulberry collection !!!
TNHunter
Is this your regular practice with mulberries–pinching late summer? I had a lot of success with a few multi-grafts this year and saw 3-4’ of growth on DMOR-9, Red Himalayan, Saharanpur Local, etc. Wondering if I should top those to encourage more side branching (and do it now or during the dormant season). Thanks.
Most of my Nigras have been extremely slow growing except this one. It grew over 6 feet this season.
I just grafted that tree last year and its grown like crazy. I thought tipping might slow it down a bit. I was kind of surpirsed to see it flower again. I’ll be taking a lot of scion off this winter for folks that want to graft. How you want to prune yours might be totally different, depending on your zone, goals etc
Which variety is it? I grafted Kaester this spring and it’s been very vigorous.
I had the same thought–wait until the dormant season to prune so I could share scions. But I think I read a recommendation somewhere to prune mulberries in the summer for shaping. I mostly need mine to branch out rather than growing straight up.
We are lucky here in southern Australia re Nigra’s. They thrive, and don’t seem to have any disease issues, and even the birds seem leave them alone. My Nigra is labelled “black english” and appears identical to all the big old trees that are still growing strong on old farm properties in my area. Some of these old trees could be a century old, would be my guess.
I do pinch/top as they grow. You end up with a long single trunk if you don’t, in my experience.
Yes! We’ve been experimenting with pruning methods to increase branching at a low height… no ladders!! We’re thinking more branches, more nodes, more fruit next spring? We’re applying a kind of Kym Green Bush (KGB) Cherry pruning method where we cut it table top flat very low to the ground once or twice a year. Here’s a Kip Parker. We’ll see how it goes but it looks promising!
Thanks. Some of these were excellent scions from your last sale! So you’re just pinching the tops during the growing season, and pruning larger branches while dormant to achieve that low shape? In my hot desert climate I’m usually trying to coax all the growth I can get from figs, mulberries, citrus, tropicals, etc. But one of the awesome things about mulberries is how quickly they grow. I’m happy to have pruning questions at this point.
I know right? To prune you need a lot of growth. 
After I put a few rows of mulberries in-ground within the hoop house I finally started to get enough growth so that I could experiment with pruning!
This pruning method is primarily shaping during the first year or two to have structure down low and then in later years cutting it to table-top flat right after harvest in the summer (typically before solstice) to stimulate even more branching. It’s pretty drastic. But I realized that productive varieties like World’s Best and Thai Dwarf naturally create more branches during the growing season, but most other mulberry varieties don’t branch as much. Fewer branches, fewer nodes, less fruit the following year… that’s the theory anyway! 
