Thanks! That was very cool. The tree has tons of character. I’m glad we can keep this going! Both my seedlings are dormant, but doing fine. I will be grafting some this year to try. I graft things every year. A very addictive habit! I have 4 plum/pluot trees, yet grow 26 cultivars and adding more. Actually adding to peach and nectarine trees now. The plum tree are full!
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That was quite a large ripe mulberry she picked…mine are sized more like the other ones in her hand.
She say the fruit amount has been declining latterly because the tree is old and the new neighbor building make more shadow. And they have made several concrete columns to support the big branches to not break.
One interesting thing she mentioned is when they dug the foundations of their building, they are surprised how thin are the roots of such a big tree!
The other useful information is that she makes a very good medicine from fresh juice(without sterilisation) with sugar to treat aphthae.
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It would be very sad to lose that specimen. It should be possible to propagate it by grafting. I know they say it is hard (impossible) to graft. But I cannot believe thats true. I have my fair share of trouble grafting morus nigra and am still testing different methods and timings. In the end it will graft, if you really try. Thats what I believe. Maybe one could try another rootstock other than morus alba. I read Broussonetia papyrifera is a possible rootstock for morus nigra. Maybe that would work?
I ordered seeds of Broussonetia papyrifera and will try to use it as a rootstock for my different nigra.
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Morus nigra is quite easily grafted onto Morus alba rootstock. Somewhat harder to performan than grafting other mulberry species but still quite a good succes rate. It does form a burl when grafted to high but when grafted close to the root collar the burl disappears over the years and results in perfect compatibility.
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Out of curiosity I have tried broussonnetia as a rootstock but zero grafts have taken. I wantend to test if Broussonnetia kazinoki could be used as dwarfing rootstock.
But it wouldn’t make sense because Broussonnetia suckers profusely and can be a real nuissance.
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In my country we plant Tagetes to get rid of nematodes. A tree nursery will sow Tagetes after all the young trees have been harvested to desinfect the soil. New trees can be planted then the following year. You can also sow Tagetes in between your trees in the garden to fight nematodes. Works very well…
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Thank you for your advice. Could you please elaborate your most successful technic and timing?
I had some success with veneer grafts in summer. I also tried bud grafting in summer and different grafts in spring with zero success so far. I plan to give spring grafting another try this year. I always used morus alba as rootstock.
I had 100% success rate with two types of nigra-on-alba spring grafts:
- top-working a large stub with bark grafts
- cleft graft on a vigorous water sprout
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Hi Mark,
what has happened to your website www.growingmulberry.org? Do you plan to bring it back online? It would be so unfortunate losing that source of info about mulberry. I just recommended your website to a friend just to find out it seems not to be online any more. Whatever you decided, I learned a lot from it, so thank you very much for your effort.
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Hi Norman…I was betting that I could get my annual website cost, via Wix, lowered by threatening to end the website. Well I lost the bet. It is supposed to still exist (as a “free” site with advertising) but the link doesn’t seem to work and I can’t find it when I do a Google search (This is supposed to be the link, but people have told me that it doesn’t work: https://marktravis4.wixsite.com/growingmulberry). I haven’t pursued trying to remedy the situation because I plan to totally change the format of the “Selections” section by eliminating trying to classify mulberries into separate species. Other than Morus nigra, perhaps there are very few “pure” cultivars, as mulberries freely cross-breed. I just can’t seem to find the time (which is funny because I’m retired). Seeing that most people visit the website in late winter to early spring, I have been dragging my feet since we are in summer months. It will be back by fall though.
BTW: Thanks for the complement.
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Thank you Mark, the link works for me. I am happy to hear it will be back online. I really felt the loss seeing your website shut down.
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It’s a great website. Very informative and dead accurate. It would be a shame to lose it…I can only imagine how much work it took. The link worked for me.
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Works for me as well. Now have to figure out how to ‘eat’ mulberry leaves to lose the weight gain from all the summer fruit.
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There is a very old and famous tree “Mathildes Traum” (Mathilde’s dream) Morus nigra in Germany:
https://www.manfredhans.de/Schwarze-Maulbeere-Mathildes-Traum
Maybe @carot can tell us more…
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I couldn’t get the link to work…. It did take me to growingmulberry.org but it was a totally white page. I’m sure I went to it not long ago though but then time flies when we are having so much fun. Hope it comes back soon!
When you get a white page, check your Download directory for any new files.
Just tried growingmulberry on my android tablet and it loaded ok.
I tried a couple of grafts of ‘Mathilde’s Traum’ but they did not grow much and died within two years (‘Aalst’ received at the same time is growing well). It could have been just poor luck on my behalf, but several other people have stated that there doesn’t appear to be any perceivable difference in fruit size, flavor, or productivity between the various “cultivars” (Here in the US, at least), so unless someone states otherwise it probably is a waste of money trying to pursue the “ultimate” Morus nigra. Grafting ‘Mathilde’s Traum’, though, would be a worthy way to preserve a bit of heritage.
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