North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Lucky Pittman <lucky.pittman@murraystate.edu>]

At 01:36 PM 06/29/2002 -0400, you wrote:
> Hi all - A wild mulberry grows next to the house and I'd like to switch to 
> a larger-fruiting variety.  It's about 6" diameter (the tree, not the 
> house) and I prune it hard to 10 ft for easy harvesting and to keep it off 
> the house.  I'd like to graft a named variety or two on it at 4 ft., but 
> can't find anything about mulberries in the books I've looked at.

Bruce,
Mulberries are pretty simple to graft or bud.
If you have access to larger-fruited varieties right now, you could T-bud 
multiple buds onto several branches, give them a couple of weeks to callus 
in, and cut off the limbs above your bud placements and force them right 
away.  You'd get sufficient growth that they should harden off before 
winter, and be 'ready to go'  next spring - might even fruit next 
year.  Or, you could place your  buds and leave them be, then prune back to 
the highest one next spring, just before bud break.

Grafting with dormant scionwood works fairly well, too, anytime after the 
bark starts to 'slip'.  I usually use just a simple bark graft - behead the 
limb(or seedling rootstock), make a vertical incision in the bark, make a 
long, slanting cut in your scion - just as you would if you were going to 
do a simple whip graft -, insert the slanted cut end of the scion into the 
slit and slide it down until the top of your cut is even with the top of 
the limb/stock.  Wrap with budding rubbers & Parafilm.  Voila!  Success 
rates should be pretty high, but you'll need to keep shoots from below the 
graft rubbed off/pinched back.

Lucky Pittman
USDA Zone 6
Hopkinsville, KY