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.