You can grow a mulberry seedling from a cutting taken from mature or young bushes. Propagate new mulberry seedlings from established trees with known flavorful and juicy fruits for highly edible berries, or propagate whatever mulberry trees you have on-hand for an abundance of plants for landscape, hedges, and wildlife habitat, and also as a way to propagate true North American native red mulberry.
Many species of mulberry are easy to propagate from hardwood cuttings, some are easier to propagate by seed or by green new-growth cuttings vs. older hardwood cuttings. Chose your propagation method based on the trees near you, or the seeds or cuttings you’re able to bring in. Talk to the owner of the tree before taking cuttings, both for permission and so you can find out the quality of the fruit and which variety of mulberry it is.
You can also propagate mulberries that are growing in your zone by seed. If you’re near the edge of the effective mulberry growing zone, like a mountain zone four that’s closer to a zone three, growing from seed can be more reliable and get trees that are more suited to your climate than propagating from cuttings. Both methods can give you a healthy mulberry seedling, or several, to further propagate.
Benefits of growing a mulberry seedling from a cutting:
First of all, if you’re taking cuttings from established trees you can chose trees with known sweet berries that are good for fresh eating. Not all seed started mulberry seedling will produce sweet and juicy fruit.
With seedlings you don’t know if you’ll have a male tree, or a female tree, with cuttings you can take directly from both types and make sure you have enough for cross pollination for good fruit set. A standard recommendation with plants that need a male cultivar for pollination is one male cultivar to four female cultivars.
Hardiness is another big one, starting mulberry seedlings from seeds, and outdoors to overwinter, can help select for the plants with hardiness to your zone. But, taking cuttings from established trees also gives you plants that are hardy to your zone and close area. There may be some microclimate differences, but cuttings also grow faster. You can also use cuttings from known trees to graft onto seedlings to get the hardiness of the seedling, and the fruiting tendencies of the other cultivar in one tree.
Lastly, you can start a mulberry seedling from a cutting at nearly any time. Sap starting to flow in spring? Good time to root cuttings. Spring leafing out and blossoming? Good time to root cuttings. Summer or fall? Just pick of immature or mature berries and you can still root cuttings.
Seeds require stratification for best germination for most mulberry types, especially the native Red mulberry trees. And the stratification process can take up to 3 months of chill before transferring the seeds over to germinate. Cuttings root very quickly, especially with the use of rooting hormone or willow tea as a natural rooting hormone.
Rooting Mulberry Cuttings:
- Start with taking cuttings from a mulberry tree. If you have existing trees and are doing spring pruning or training, this is a good time to take the prunings and set them up as cuttings.
- Cuttings should be 6″ in length, and can be longer or a bit shorter. Just make sure it’s an easy size to handle. The cutting should have a sloped cut on the lower end, and a straight cut at the top end.
- Trim leaves from the cutting’s stem, keeping only 1 or 2 clusters of leaves at the top end.
- Dip the lowest end (thickest end, lowest on the original branch) in rooting hormone and plant into moistened potting soil. You can use a specialty mix of soil, perelite, and vermiculite, or just use whatever potting soil you have on hand. I put 4-8 cuttings per gallon pot at this stage, then cover the pot with a clear plastic dome to keep humidity around the cuttings.
- A secondary technique is to make willow water with chopped willow sticks, then strain the water and place your trimmed cuttings in a vase in the willow water. Willow water contains natural rooting hormone and you should see visible root nodules begin forming on the cuttings in the vase within 2-3 weeks. Just top the jar or vase up with fresh water as needed, and transplant into potting soil once the root nodules form. Keep covered with a humidity dome, once transfered, for 2 weeks or until the plants begin sending out new growth.
Transplanting Cuttings:
Once your cuttings are rooted and growing, you have mulberry seedlings. Transplant them into a nursery bed, or individual one gallon pots when they start looking crowded or you glimpse roots in the drainage openings of the bottom of the pot. Try to transplant the seedlings before they get root bound.
I like to let seedlings grow for at least one year before transplanting them into their permanent home. Autumn is actually one of the best times to transplant new plants to a permanent home. The fall rains help the roots establish, and the dormant season lets the plants focus on roots before sending out the new spring growth.
Pruning and Care:
For harvesting and ease of access prune your mulberry seedlings to form their canopy about 4-6 feet up the trunk. Train branches in the cardinal directions to arch over the surrounding areas, and keep the top of the tree from growing too tall and vigorous. For trees producing a sacrificial crop, you can still train the pick-able canopy, but leave a leader to grow tall and have fruit high up out of easy human reach for the birds. Mulberry trees grow up to 15 feet tall, and will send up many shoots and branches, so you can train them how you need for hedges (thick and weedy), orchards (trained canopy for easy picking without a ladder), or sacrificial fruit crop (some accessible picking and a good tall leader for the birds).
Most of the training and pruning, besides maintenance, happens in years 2-5 for grafted and rooted cutting seedlings, and in years 3-5 for seedlings started from seed.
I would also recommend protecting the roots and trunk during the winter with a metal cage set into the soil by 2″ – 6″ and out from the tree’s trunk by 2 feet if you live in an area with voles or pocket gophers. Pocket gophers and voles will eat the roots of mulberry seedlings from underneath during the winter, and will also sometimes ring the trunks of fruit trees too. I use hardware cloth protected, deep garden beds for seedling beds and to tuck in and insulate gallon pots for winter to protect them from gophers and voles.
Why Grow Mulberries?
You may be thinking “why grow mulberries?” They’re messy, weedy trees with fruit that stains concrete and can be messy with birds eating the fruits and creating even more mess. What’s important about a mulberry? Well, in North America we have two native mulberry species, the red mulberry is cold hardy and thrives in Ontario Canada, it’s hardy to zone four (I’m growing it in zone 3). And there is the Texas mulberry that’s hardy to zone 5. They produce small fruits throughout their fruiting season, with the fruit ripening over time.
The dried berries are delicious, as are the fresh ones. Fresh berries don’t hold up well to transport, so they are rare to find fresh in markets, making them a unique crop. You can also use the berries in pies, jam, jelly, wine, and even mead.
Most commercially planted mulberries are Morus Alba or white mulberry. This species can cross pollinate and hybridize with the North American native species, and reduce their footprint. For this reason, I recommend not planting white mulberry trees, unless you really need a white mulberry for white mulberry leaves for raising silk worms. But silkworms should be able to eat other mulberry tree species leaves too.
You can get bare root seedlings for many mulberry species including some like the Illinois everbearing mulberry, or the black mulberry that Baker Creek sells. Getting a few separate, ID’d plants, can help you establish your own hedge or orchard of mulberry trees. Once you have separate plants established, you can grow more from the fruits and seeds, or take cuttings and grow more that way. Mulberry is actually easy to cultivate and propagate.
Mulberry has a place in permaculture orchards and hedgerows for both humans and animals to enjoy. It can be grown near apples and pears and the smaller fruits can be used as a distraction or sacrificial crop for birds and mammals. A sour or small fruited mulberry seedling is great for tucking into a less protected hedgerow for the raccoon, opossum, deer, birds, and other small mammals to access (protect the seedling tree until well established, and continue protecting the trunk for the first 10 or so years if deer are in the area).
Back to You:
If you would consider growing a mulberry seedling in your garden or as part of a permaculture project, which variety would you chose?
What else would you like to learn about the mulberry tree? Leave a comment!
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