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.

This is the reason it's said you should prune mulberries while dormant yet I've seen a few guides not mention it at all and go on about growth season pruning. You normally see this subject about grape vines bleeding sap in here and though it may look bad, things usually end up ok as Edyminion says. Black, white and red mulberry will take to grafting and other propagation methods differently and with varying success. It seems you want grafted trees but black mulberry (iirc) get a high success rate from planting branches quite deeply. It may be worth looking in to this method if you haven't already. The fully dormant grafting seems worth a try to me, I'd be interested to find out if it was successful. Good luck Alex

I find electric tape works the best. It holds it so good that most times it's strong enough for birds to land on it. depending on what type of graft. I guess it comes down to how well you can stretch the tape around to hold the graft perfectly. I don't know how any water gets past unless the tape isn't applied so it is flat and tight. It's not hard to make a relief cut on the tap latter either. Now That's with apple. If your grafting something like peach you need to wrap the whole scion with parafilm so it doesn't dry out. don't use anything tar it will kill it. I learned that my first time grafting. If your talking grafting sealant like Treekote that's not tar. I use that sometimes over the tape if the wrap doesn't look good and on the open cut ends. Bees wax works great. The toilet seal is an easy way to get it too.

Chiming in from the west coast, IE seems to be my best so far. It is healthy and produces well, tastes great. I can't say that for my lavender, which took a long time to bear, tastes OK, small berries, but is having a disease problem on the trunk that is threatening to girdle it. Oscar that has been in the ground about 3 years also has a disease problem and had a large portion of the top die as well as having dieback on the trunk. So far it starts to make fruit then they don't develope so have never tasted it. Noir de Spain and its replacement both died over winter. Black Beauty is grafted very high, at 6 feet, which is very inconvenient, it was all Burnt Ridge had at the farmer's market. It has trouble getting the sap up to the branches in spring so has a lot of dieback. The "flavor" that I've seen raved about is mostly due to its being highly acidic. I ate a berry once with my head tilted back and the acid was burning my throat. So... I'll vote for IE, though I have the weeping mulberry and while the berries are small, it has a nice flavor, is very early, and the weeping habit hides the berries from the birds.:-P It is really cute, too. I got the variegated Paper Dolls, which has partly reverted to green and is still very small, like under 12" tall, it's 3rd year. If it ever amounts to anything I will report. A poor "second" of Wellington I bought didn't make it, so I didn't get to try it. When I was a kid in Houston, there was a great white mulberry that was very large, sweet, and juicy, but I don't know what variety it was. I would go for it if I could. Silk Hope and Pakistan sound great, but I would like to hear of their growing well locally.