Thank you Everyone for all of your help!! To answer a few questions: I took my pictures to another nursery and talked to a very nice man who told me exactly what I needed to do. 1) I was overwatering 2) I needed to scrape back the bark to see if the stems on top were alive, and prune down any dead bark 3) He said the white buds on it mean that it IS a fruiting tree. I don't understand why finding a fruiting mulberry would be hard to find or so pricey (we paid $30) with the nursery owner guaranteeing me it was fruiting but that he just couldn't remember the exact name. The Bamboo stake was in the potted mulberry when we bought it. When we dug the hole we just stuck the whole thing in there, mixed in top soil and original soil, the whole fertilizer, weed prevention, root stimulator bit, mulched, guarded, and done. If you think moving it and tying it straight at maybe an angle is better for it I will do that. I was sort of advised that if I wanted a mullbery TREE VS. BUSH I should just cut that stock at the very bottom off anyways, but I'm going to wait for the stems to start blooming because the notion of a mulberry bush seems cool too.... have to decide... plus if the top dies I'd like to revive the bottom and it can grow anew!

Well, an update and to address a few things I didn't get back on earlier. :) Many years ago there might have been parent trees for these suckers. That was long ago. Bogturtle? You only think that poison ivy is gone. Just wait until you see what comes up from ALL the roots next spring. Been there, done it. You've gotta don a space suit and pull out as many of those long, spidering, hairy roots as you can, and you'll still get ivy. Don't give up, though. As far as butterflies go? There are 3.5 more acres of my property upon which they can make their coccons. I have so many butterfly-encouraging plants my yard almost wiggles it's so alive. I'm not concerned about killing some spindly, aggressive suckers that came from some parent plant someone must have hacked down years go. Wanting "pretty" and wanting all my chosen plants to have a fighting chance? I find myself somewhat resentful of the blackmail-ish question, given that only LynnT has seen my land to comment upon that by which I "want to be known." That said, again, there are enough of these trees squishing everything else out to satisfy all the deer and butterflies and bugs and bees in the area. Ok. Update: First, I tried the Round-up. Round-up is always my friend. It's helped me clear 3 acres of poison ivy so thick the vines look like weeping trees. Vines so thick we couldn't see the roof of the house we bought. Vines that taught me what poison ivy is. Round-up killed the foliage and ... My newest best friend, Ortho Brush-b-gone killed the remaining, visable woody stems. This also took care of the final gasps of all that darned briar rose. So, after the Round-Up had taken care of the foliage but where a few of the stems remained green? I snipped them, creating an open wound. I put the BBB into that nice wound. Believe it or not, by the next week, they were blackened and shrivled. The underground stumps seem to still be trying to put out new growth. What I've done is to pull the new growth out, which comes out with a long, tap-rootish thing. Now, down into the hole from where it's coming? I carefully pour a dribble of the BBB into it. We'll see if they continue to come back, but I am greatly encouraged. I am going to have to figure out what to do with these darned things that are coming up through my heuchera, tiarella, epimedium, etc. And, now to deal with all these crappy junk cherry trees native to us here in Maryland. They reseed all the heck over the place and are a weeding day of their own. The we have those darned onions.... Stop me. Thanks all, though, for the advice! I am hopeful in my limited success. Christine

Scott, We have too many houses too close together to allow deer hunting by rifle. None of us on our end of the road (6 houses on plots of land ranging from 5 acres to 200 acres) allow hunting with guns on our land because there's so many cows, horses, dogs, cats and children within close proximity. Our neighbor to the west allows bowhunting on his place. And, we still have idiots spotlighting and shooting from the road, which is illegal of course. One year a bullet came whistling by my head and missed me by only a couple of inches, and I was about 600' back from the road. We never found out who fired that shot. We all enjoy watching the deer. You know that I feed them, as do most of the neighbors. One of our newest neighbors has set up a deer feeder to attract deer so they can take photos and videos of the deer. The aggressive deer that was dancing and prancing in the road probably was returning from visiting that feeder. I always encounter a few aggressive bucks each year, but they tend to stand on the edge of the woods and snort and stamp their feet. This one just really shocked me with the "dancing and prancing" as it ran right down the middle of the roadway. Last night, as I was closing up the guinea coop, a buck stood on the edge of the woods and pawed the ground impatiently, waiting for me to go inside so he could come gobble up any henscratch the guineas and chickens missed yesterday. My sister told me earlier this week that her boyfriend isn't having much luck at his new deer lease in south Texas this year. I told her that if he'd come up here and sit on the patio for a couple of hours around twilight, he could get a couple of deer in no time. Really, though, I hate the thought of anyone shooting 'our' deer. They were here first. Dawn

Hi, I have a couple of questions regarding Mulberries: 1. I read that Morus rubra (the US native mulberry) only grows to 20' in the northeast - that it only grows to 50 or 70 in the south or mid west? I live in NJ and hope that the tree is a small one (as in around 20'). 2. Will the taste of Morus rubra's berries be significantly worse then the commercial M. alba x M. rubra hybrids, such as 'Illinois Everbearing'? 3. I really want(ed) to stick with the native variety (M. rubra), but don't want to significantly compromise on taste - could I graft a M. rubra limb onto my non-native M. alba x M. rubra hybrid (sapling) so that I have both varieties - I'll actually end up just keeping most of the tree M. rubra and only a single maintained limb of the original hybrid. 4. Will grafting the M. rubra onto the M. alba (x M. rubra) rootstock minimize the risk that M. rubra often experiences of root disease (spread by M. alba)? I figure that since the roots are not M. rubra's (at least I think they don't use M. rubra to do grafts) this would be an advantage. 5. Is M. rubra self-fertile - some sites say yes - and some say that it varies. I guess if it's female, the M. alba x M. rubra self-fertile limb would fertilize it. 6. Do you think that a 10' tall and wide Mulberry tree provides all the fruit one would want; if so, I might keep it pruned small. Thanks, Steve