Looked at a Red Mulberry. Label said 50’ x 35’.
Is there a problem making dwarf mulberry trees?
There are some around. However, there are no dwarfing rootstocks available, so you’re limited to naturally dwarf varieties. If you search “dwarf mulberry” on this forum, you’ll find an abundance of threads on the various types of dwarf mulberry. I highly recommend using the search before posting a new thread. You’ll find reams of info on questions you didn’t even know you wanted the answers to.
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i just bought two from Logees that were labeled as Dwarf
No idea how they will end up though!
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I ran that trap too as I only have room for something on the smaller side.
What I came up with using all the resources here was Gerardi.
The thread you might want to look at it “What makes Gerardi a dwarf” or something like that.
The internode distance is much smaller (petioles per foot) so the whole tree is, I guess you could say, compressed.
Of course the tree I bought last year appears to not be as labeled, so I had to graft this spring with the true Gerardi… Only at a few inches on the grafts as of now, but by mid summer I should be easily able to confirm the spacing of the leaves.
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Here is that particular thread
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I have Gerardi 3 years now.
It is dwarf… and has very tight nodes.
No problem at all keeping it at 8-10 ft with a little pruning.
I have silk hope and oscar too (not dwarf)… and sure it is going to be more difficult to keep them under control and sized as I want. More agressive pruning I am sure. I pruned about 6 ft of growth off my silk hope this early spring and it was just planted last year.
Are there other good flavored dwarf mulberries that work for zone 7 ?
I know about Jans best… working great in z9b for Jan… but she does not think it will work for zone 7 (out too early).
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Ive read speculations that ‘Jan’s Best’ is one and the same as ‘World’s Best’, which is also reputedly ‘Thai Dwarf’ or a variant thereof. I know that Bryce, the guy who was hawking ‘worlds Best’ said it was successfully being grow at a relatives place in WV, zone 6. You might give that one a shot. I have it growing here- no idea what Ill do with it. Thought about planting it in the ground inside the high tunnel perhaps. I think the low-chill aspect is the more problematic part of growing those “less hardy” muberry varieties. Perhaps protection could be worked out similar to figs. Im not sure if itd be worthwhile or not. Ive had decent luck planting my non-hardy/ low chill figs in the ground for the season and digging them up to overwinter. I had only one, DMOR9, but now I have a few others too- Persian, Shangri La, and Worlds Best. I don’t intend to keep them indefinitely if they dont work out. We’ll see
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I’m quite new to mulberry’s.
But if read that Morus nigra is very slow growing. And it is often grafted on faster growing Morus alba. Has anyone tried grafting an alba variety on morus nigra roots? Did that slow down the Morus alba?
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Morus nigra growing in my grandparents’ village are the largest fruit trees I have ever seen. They are like magic beans in the right climate once they hit the ground water table. The new growth on my trees is pinkie finger-thick while that on white and black albas can be just 3mm in diameter.
A friend of ours was trying to train some nigras into large bonsais. It is my favourite tree related joke as they ended up released to (relative) freedom in our orchard after he gave up the fight.
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There is a way to slow them down, though. By pruning them into a bush/multi-stem as soon as possible. They may still get a growth spurt if some leaders break off. This is a slowed down morus nigra I took a pic of yesterday in a nearby village.
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Many don’t grow nigra because it is not cold hardy unfortunately.
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I have a couple of the one’s that are simply called dwarf ever-bearing mulberry. If you run across those don’t waste your time. They are a true dwarf, but the fruit is horrible.
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I had ‘Issai’ dwarf mulberry for a bit. It was not hardy here. Also, the fruit was teeny and bland
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Probably the same thing. The fruit is small and taste worse than bland.
Interesting. I also have a dwarf everbearing, and I think it tastes delicious. It is very sweet. They are very small though.
I think I have that one. It would die to the ground each winter for the first handful of years and then it slowly started keeping a trunk. Now it’s probably ten feet tall and no longer dying back in winters. The fruit however, seems to be the most dwarf thing about it. Very hard to get a mouth full.
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We had a dwarfing weeping mulberry which never got over 9 feet. Here are a few options depending on what you want. Not all produce much fruit. A true weeping dwarf is often able to produce only a half dozen berries. They get 6 -8 feet tall. Some dwarfs produce a full crop.
There are cold hardy European varieties. Plenty of old trees growing in 6a. Namelessness of old true nigras (new namings arise by location of old mother trees at present) and miss-classification (How does this happen, when you can tell a nigra from an alba in mid-winter?), plus nurseries using images from photo banks are a problem though. We have a nigra variety called Trnavska that has survived the winter of 1986 with flying colours.
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@hobilus …
Jan says her Jans Best and Bryces worlds best are similar in the huge amount of fruit they produce… but worlds best fruit are a bit larger… Jans best is a bit smaller.
Taste wise she claims there is a big difference… worlds best is often quite bland… occasionally better but often quite bland and somewhat variable… you never know what you are going to get… yuck… or pretty good.
Her Jans best fruit is super abundant always… and has a consistently good more complex flavor. Her Jans best is consistently delicious.
In the YT vid above she talks about them.
I think she recommends her Jans Best for zone 9 and 8.
I am in 7b now with the recent change.
I might have to try a Jans Best.
She did say at the end of that vid that someone had reported that Jans Best was doing well in 5b.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about mulbs from reading on here, it’s that quality of a given mulberry variety is highly variable depending on the site. So one person’s favorite may be absolutely worthless at someone else’s site.
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