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Fruit & Orchards

Rooting or grafting mulberries

12 years ago

This may sounds funny, mulberries grows wild all over the place, many are only good for birds. But I know a mulbery tree in a park that produce big juicy delicious fruits every year and I had steal some cuttings to root every year but never had any luck. I wonder if I would have better luck grafting instead. I have many wild mulbery seedlings in my yard. If grafting is the way to go, please give me some tips. If rooting is the way to go, are there some tricks I was missing? Any insight are appreciated.

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Comments (7)

rmbill
12 years ago
My son has a couple of really good Mulbery trees and I am going to try grafting them on to some of my trees. I am in Michigan and the time for grafting is upon us, here.
Bill
Bradybb WA-Zone8
12 years ago
homegro,
I found this video on Youtube which may be helpful. Brady

Here is a link that might be useful: Propagating Mulberry
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Cousin Floyd: I just pruned away some unwanted twigs/branches on an IL Everbearing tree (bearer of only very small berries) before going back outside to topwork it with 3 other varieties. Because the tree is actively growing now and forming leaves and berries, the sap is oozing out of the cut branches....good for the scions that will be thirsty for that sap starting this afternoon. .....Flooding a graft with EXCESS sap, such as when doing cleft grafts on muscadine vines, is a problem. The pressured clear sap ends up dripping/squirting through the taped graft for many days and interferes with healing. On those, I have done strategic notching on the upstream r/s vine to divert some of the flow until the graft area stops dripping from the oversupply. When the notches are "deep enough but not too deep", dripping occurs at the notches rather than through the graft tape further downstream.
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Of the several Pakistan trees here, all but one have similar r/s-to-Pak. trunk girths after years of growth. The one with the thinner Pak. trunk is about 30% thinner, and this tree is just as old as the others. It seems that the r/s definitely dwarfed it's grafted scion, and that might be good for having a shorter canopy to pick fruit from. No problems with that idea. BUT...., when this early March after all the m/b trees had already come out of dormancy and were sporting tons of new leaves and new fruit, a surprise freeze happened with 100% ice coating on everything that rain could reach and 23 degrees to go with it. The thicker trees with thicker branches lost all the leaves/fruit like the dwarfed tree, but there was a WHOLE LOT more dead branches on the dwarfed tree. Even though they were the same age and had the same r/s size. Lesson learned: Thickerer is betterer when a late freeze blasts through after the trees come out of dormancy...... If I was just starting out with "young" Pak. trees in a place that can get freezes, Each late Fall I would surround the tree with a 6 foot tall circle of fence at least 4 foot wide and just fill the whole thing with dry leaves. In Spring when I was relatively sure that freezes were no longer a risk, I would lift the circle fence and push the dry leaves aside for the branches/trunk to start growing out. I would not get rid of the leaves for another "while" until there was even less chance of a later freeze....just in case the leaves need to be put back inside the fence. Afterwards, the leaves can be placed around the tree for mulch, since they will shrink downward over time. The fence goes on vacation until next Winter. Over the years the lower 6 foot of the tree will get thicker and more cold hardy. And hopefully bust out with new leaves and new fruit on the branches within the 6 foot-high area after the leaf covering comes off each Spring.
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Anyone else seen this kind of growth with a mulberry graft? Its now 22 inches long and still growing like crazy, more side shoots too. In a climate where many of the native trees put on only three or four inches of growth all year, to see this single bud jump into action like this was pretty exciting. I did see a reference to IE mulberry as having "extremely vigorous young grafts" in the book Cornucopia. It also look like success with 8 other mulberry grafts, on in-ground trees, but they were done later and only have grown a few inches. In any event, I'm planning to dig up as many weedy Morus alba saplings as possible next winter, to use as rootstock for more IE grafts!
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Oh no, sorry, I meant the scion. I put the prunings in a glass of water, and one of them developed roots. So it sounds like the rootstock is probably a fruitless variety? Yes, they are well away from the house. I also planted a dwarf mulberry, that’s already 12’ in one year! They grow really fast here, but my family is crazy about the berries so we’re very happy. Thank you SO much for your help—I am learning so much from this group! :-)
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gonebananas_gw
12 years ago
Some mulberries root easily from cuttings and others don't.

They graft easily. There is also a clever trick where you graft a short piece of an easy rooting one on the bottom of a cutting of a hard-to-root one and then plant the whole thing as a cutting with the graft well below ground. The bottom will root, the two will fuse, and usually (it is said) the top will eventually root, though it doesn't matter if it does or not. Here, you want the graft wrapped in easily rotted thread or twine.
homegro
Original Author
12 years ago
Thank you all for the info. When I tried rooting, I simply stick them to the ground, this had worked for me on plants such as figs, camellia, willow, etc. but somehow it doesn't work for the particular mulberry that I was interested in rooting. I also did it before the leaves bud out in early spring, not when they are growing in full swing, as seen in the video. I also never used rooting horomone or gel which may have made a difference. It sounds like grafting is an easier way to propagate mulberries, so I will give it a try. Thanks everyone again.
cousinfloyd
12 years ago
Can anyone say which particular varieties (of the common named ones) root well and which don't?
copingwithclay
12 years ago
Regretfully, Pakistan m/b cuttings leaf out before any roots can form....and later wither away.
bonsaist
12 years ago
I've had various success rates with rooting cuttings. I've rooted hardwood and softwood summer cuttings. The hard wood cuttings seem to respond to using rooting hormone and bottom heat. Grafting is more successful than rooting cutting.
Try rooting softwood cutting. They seem to root easily as softwood cuttings. Check out my blog on rooting softwood fig cutting, it works the same with with softwood mulberry.

Bass

Here is a link that might be useful: Rooting softwood cuttings.

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