North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["William C. Garthright" <billg@inebraska.com>]

> They are impossible for me to keep in a small space but you can keep 
> them in-bounds by pruning them to a weep and summer pruning them once 
> a season- removing all vigorous upright growth.  They make beautiful 
> trees managed this way and you keep a lot of fruit in ladderless reach.


I've been trying to do that with the Illinois Everbearing Mulberry I 
still have (half) alive.

But I have another problem with this variety. Since it doesn't bear 
fruit all at once, but just a little bit all summer, the birds clean 
them out before they ever get completely ripe. I didn't think of that 
when I planted this tree. With a normal mulberry - or, at least, the 
wild ones around here - the berries all come ripe at once, so there are 
always plenty to eat, even after the birds take their share.

Yeah, I could net the tree, like I have to do with my grapevines, but 
that's a pain, especially if I had to leave the net up all summer. And 
the tree grows so vigorously that I'd have to cut the net off at the end 
of the season. (Not to mention that it's hard to pick berries when the 
tree is netted.) Yeah, the Illinois Everbearing Mulberry was a definite 
mistake here, for several reasons.

Bill
Lincoln, NE (zone 5)

--
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did 
succeed in making those idiots understand their language. - Mark Twain