North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[rob hamilton <lostman_amiga@yahoo.com>]

It must be nice to have a big lot to play with. I only
have about a 1/4 achre city lot. This is the reason I
am intersted in keeping my trees short. One of these
days I will move to the country.  I just I need to
just try out a bunch of mullberries too see what I
like. then I could ideally graft them on to a dwarf
rootstock and grow it as a bush (assuming that the
dwarfing influance will affect the new graft.
 
Robert

--- Lucky Pittman <lucky.pittman@murraystate.edu>
wrote:
> At 02:46 PM 7/9/2003 -0700, Rob wrote:
> >Are you going to the SFF meeting in a few weekes? I
> >would like to meet up with you and discuss in
> detail
> >what you are doing with your mulberries. One of
> these
> >days, I hope I will get over there to see them.
> 
> Sadly, I won't be in attendance.
> 
> Like many of the fruits here, I first planted
> mulberries at my wife's 
> behest.  She'd grown up climbing a big mulberry in
> the yard across the 
> street from her childhood home, eating berries 'til
> she was stuffed.  She 
> wanted our kids to have the same sort of experience.
> I'd had no real experience with them, other than a
> big productive seedling 
> tree in the yard of the farmhouse we lived in while
> I was in grad school at 
> U. of MO, but as was the case with the pecans,
> hickories, and persimmons, I 
> quickly became quite impressed with 'em, or at least
> with Illinois Everbearing
> The seedling trees - one was purchased as M.rubra,
> but it's M.alba - 
> produce heavy crops of small, tart berries, and they
> ripen about the same 
> time as the strawberries and cherries, serving as a
> 'diversion' crop for 
> the birds, lessening depredation on the cherries &
> strawberries.  The 
> Illinois trees are better climbing candidates, as
> they don't produce the 
> profusion of small, scratchy twigs present on the
> M.albas, and my 9-yr old 
> goes out at least twice a day for a session of
> climbing and grazing in the 
> mulberry trees.  Early on, this season, birds were
> getting more of the 
> Illinois fruits than we were, but now they seem to
> have moved on to other 
> targets(like the blueberries), leaving most of the
> ripening mulberries for us.
> At present, we just pick and eat, but I suspect as
> the trees continue to 
> grow larger and produce more fruit, we might start
> using them for 
> cooking.  I have made mulberry cobbler, and it's
> very good.
> 
> I've had a chance to sample a few 'wild'
> white-fruited M.alba trees, and 
> they're just not to my liking - some sweetness, but
> flavor is lacking - 
> taste like grass to me.
> 
> Lucky
> 
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