Let me add some Nordic influence into the fray also! Janne from Finland reporting in! And yes, that’s Janne with TWO n:s, unlike the fianceé of Tarzan (may I say I am also rather more hairy than Maureen O’Sullivan). But I digress, here’s my two cents on the subject:
I live in southern Finland, which might be something close to a 5b USDA climate…though I’d rather use Köppen-Geiger climate classification, for international purposes. There we are Dfb , characteristics:
- description : Cold - Without dry season - Warm Summer
- Number of months where the (average) temperature is above 10C = 4
Usually winters don’t go under -25C/-17F …and that very rarely (this winter not once it has gone under -20C…yet). Come march the night and day will be equally long, and summers have of course plenty of light. Some summers the heat goes over 30C/86F , for a short bursts.
And here I am, trying to grow pawpaw, Asimina triloba, as well! I planted last summer two seedlings (one from Alleghny and one from NC-1) that I got from Mustila arboretum, that is more inland and north…and they have two pawpaws that have survived everything, though growing slowly due being in almost full shade. So I have my hopes up, and ordered pawpaw seeds from Oikos yesterday. I also ordered Diospyros virginiana, american persimmon seeds as well, because if pawpaws can survive, so can persimmons, am I right?
But ahem, we are here to talk about mulberries…I happen to live near a botanical garden, where I walk almost every free day and…well…see If there is something to “borrow” to my home garden. There we have two fully mature morus alba trees, fruiting small but very tasty fruits to my taste. From wild seeds, not any cultivar. So that should definetely survive here, and so I am sowing in the days to come both white mulberry and black mulberry seeds for cold stratification, for mass seedlings production. In my hopes I either root a cutting from that botanical garden and graft to that some more noteworthy cultivar (that Sweet Lavender looked sooo yummy!), or graft to a seedling.
I got plenty of space at my dad’s farm, I can chop a piece of a field to my purpose any time, so I’ll be conducting seed trials, a la “survival of the fittest” on a field, because I’m hoping to cultivate my own cultivars of pawpaws, mulberries (even black), persimmons and various nut trees.
I am studying to be a professional gardener/green builder, and I plan to use all surviving hardy plants to benefit me also on that part (to be selling “exotic trees”).
Boy, you can’t believe how MUCH I spend times on internet trying to find forums to exchange scion wood, to talk to fellow growers, and of course to find SOME nurseries in europe that A) can speak in english and B) can ship to here with modernate costs.
I could talk for hours on walnuts alone, and grafting etc…but best to leave that for another topic.
I’ll stop this rant to say that my secret desire is to get some true morus rubras to grow near me, even without decent berries. And has anyone ever heard of a swedish variant of Morus accidosa ‘Mulle’ ?? It seems that it is there cultivated but only pages are in swedish. Said to quite like black mulberry, but can survive as north as Stockholm, which would be quite like my climate.
-Janne