Why don't they make dwarf mulberry trees?

General Fruit Growing
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Ive ordered several varieties from Peaceful Heritage online. Im in Upstate NY and require a zone 5 hardy or better. They ship scion wood and green wood cuttings depending on the time of year. Here is their list. They also sell small potted trees online.

Description

For the resourceful and skilled grower we offer scion wood for grafting. This is UN-ROOTED SCION WOOD ONLY, NOT A TREE. It is for GRAFTING PURPOSES only. You must have a compatible rootstock with which to graft on. Choose scion wood type below. If interested in BULK QUANTITIES AND PRICING please email us your request. order @ peacefulheritage .com

SCION WOOD SHIPS FEBRUARY- MAY ONLY. GREEN WOOD CUTTINGS SHIP JULY-AUGUST

NATURALLY GROWN PRODUCT

Approximately 7-8″ Dormant mulberry cuttings with no roots. Shipped viable and moist. Should have at least 3-5 buds each.

Cultivars:

Beautiful Day: Delicious super-sweet, small white fruits. Heavy production. FL selection, cold hardy in zone 6.

Collier: Heirloom, cold-hardy northern selection. Produces a large, ‘Illinois Everbearing’ like fruit with a long fruiting season.

Honeydrops: KY selection with pink fruits with delicious sweet and nutty flavor. Heavy production. Semi-Dwarf tree.

Illinois Everbearing: Produces long, large, black fruits with outstanding flavor. Heavy production over several months.

Kokuso: Early ripening selection with heavy production of mild purple fruit.

Madhava: KY selection with super-sweet black fruit and heavy production. Semi-dwarf size resilient tree.

Miss Kim: Southern selection (GA), with plump black fruit with excellent flavor. Said to be free of Popcorn disease.

Rupp’s Romanian: Vigorous, tree-form mulberry with tasty black fruit.

Silk Hope: Southern selection (NC) with long, black fruits with outstanding flavor. Produces for several months. Said to be free of Popcorn disease.

Taylor #1: KY selection from Morus tartarica seed. Produces unusually large black fruit early in the season. Fruit is good with mild flavor. Heavy production. Cold hardy.

Varaha: KY selection. Red mulberry with very large fruits of excellent quality and very heavy production.

Vajra: Turkish selection that produces exceptionally large white fruit that ripens to a light lavender and has a very nice sweet flavor. One of our favorites.

Viola’s Lavender: A wild selection from Indiana, produces lovely lavender-colored non-staining, medium-small berries with excellent flavor and sweetness. One of our favorites.

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42

On their website, there are other varieties as well that arent sold as scion wood. My quest for new Mulberry trees began when the tree I had planted 10 years ago that was about 25 feet tall apparently had the bark freeze on the lower 6 feet of the trunk of the tree. I think sunlight heated up the trunk during the day and then it froze off that night. Only on one side of the tree. That tree lived another year and produced great but didnt survive the next winter. I had planted that tree to distract the birds from eating the blueberries, Raspberries, and it worked great. When it was gone, I suddenly had a real problem with them. Now Ive planted the new varieties all over the property so hopefully in a couple years everyone will be happy again. So far Ive planted Taylor, Kokuso, Silk Hope , Varaha, Madhava, and Gerardi.

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43

I’m pretty skeptical of Zone 7 for Valdosta. I got one from JFAE and planted it in 2021 in 8A North Georgia, right next to Silk Hope:

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It was a vigorous grower – about the same as Silk Hope – and was notable for producing several particularly large leaves, the biggest I’ve seen on a mulberry. It started producing fruit the next year, and they looked to be shaping up to be quite large even in the green immature stage, but the tree succumbed to a late frost.

Mine was (1) very quick to break dormancy – faster than any of my other mulberries and several weeks ahead of Silk Hope, and (2) evidently particularly susceptible to freeze damage. We had a late freeze in 2022 that wasn’t particularly bad – maybe 28 or 29 degrees. Silk Hope took minor damage and still managed to produce a few fruit and put on massive growth during the year, but Valdosta was completely destroyed down to the graft, even though it’d had a full year’s growth to get established.

Valdosta is certainly interesting, but I don’t think I’m going to try it again. I put a Gerardi in its place.

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44

@marten … thanks for those details.

If that happened for you in north GA… with Valdosta… i would expext the same or worse here.

My silk hope and gerardi both got just a bit of frost damage this year and both came out about the same time with silk hope just ahead of gererdi a few days.

They are both fine now… putting on new growth and fruit.

Planted a new Oscar this spring and it was a little later to bud out than the other two… but that may have just been new startup delay. Will see what it does next spring.

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45

I wonder if this can be used as a dwarfing interstem or rootstock?
It’s easy to root mulberry. And the dwarfing effects of interstems have been proven, the longer the interstem the more dwarfing, I think 15" of interstem is something like 90% of the effect of that variety as a rootstock.

Also weeping mulberry is a good solution too, I assume they’re usually grafted onto a tall thin rootstock or seedling trunk and then grown out…
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@BobVance tried it with Gerardi and it didn’t work

His hypothesis is that it’s the heavy fruit set that keeps Gerardi small. This is in contrast with dwarfing apple rootstocks, which limit overall growth.

Perhaps other dwarf mulberries will work.

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47

The past conversations about Gerardi’s growing style is that the internode distance is much shorter than other mulberries and that leads to a more compact growth pattern.

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48

I’ve found that when the mulberries are stripped early (such as after a groundhog eats all the leaves), the internode distance goes up. Either way, it’s not throttling overall vigor.

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@jcguarneri Agree, Jay. My friend Gordon, who lived at Flint MI said Illinois Everbearing was the sorriest mulberry he’d grown. He sent me scions of his favorite, one that he’d purchased (mislabeled) as ‘Pakistan’ (it was not). It was just ‘meh’ here, and I did not keep it long, after it first fruited.

The ‘Lawson Dawson’ ortet is growing in the corner of a barnlot, 20 ft or so from a small pond; cattle lounged (and peed and pooped) under it. The original fruits I was given were large, juicy and tasty. My oldest graft of LD is located in my lawn… close to the pond, but no livestock lounging beneath it. Berries are smaller and less juicy than those that made me gall in love with it - but still have great flavor. But, two other clones, planted in fencelines of the barnlot, where livestock can, and do, lounge beneath them, produce larger, juicier fruits, with that same great flavor.

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Dwarf is relative to standard height. The mature height of Mulberry trees is about 60’ in my climate.

So-called dwarfing rootstocks are used to produce shorter or more manageable size trees of some fruit species. These are often sold as “dwarf”. For example, Dwarf Lemon. However, left unpruned they can reach nearly standard height at maturity (30’).

There are also genetic dwarfs produced by breeding standards with mutated offspring that have very short internode spacing. For example, Garden Prince almond.

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This one unfortunately has been nicknamed Dwarf Neverbearing by one disappointed owner.
The dwarfing is likely not related to fruiting at all.

In this thread @Bakeapple has a Dwarf Everbearing and says it stays small without fruiting.
Meaning in my amateur opinion, if they sell these trees grown on their own roots, it will dwarf the top tree, or fall over from poor anchoring. If it is only the grafted variety which is dwarfed it still could be tried as a rootstock, but may only be useful as an interstem.
This may be the dwarfing solution everyone is looking for.

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My mom grew a dwarf weeping mulberry for years. It never got more than 7 feet.

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I should probably add that my mulberry has been treated very poorly and has likely been stunted for years. I initially planted it in a spot that was too shady and dry, then replanted it very carelessly three times in equally bad spots over the next few years. That’s probably the main reason for its low vigour and lack of fruit. However, there is a 20+ ft mulberry with nice fruit in my neighbourhood, so maybe I’ll try grafting that onto the dwarf neverbearing next year to see how it works.

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