Grow your own – Mulberry trees

Bill and his wife Carol love mulberries.
Bill and his wife Carol love mulberries.

I grew up in an outer suburb of Ipswich where many homes had a chook pen with a Mulberry tree.

The chooks provided fertiliser and the tree dropped plenty of excess fruit as payment.

One of the fruit trees in our chook pen here is a Mulberry.  

My wife and I still have a soft spot for them and when they come into season, we enjoy a feed of fresh mulberries.

In total we have around 25 Mulberry trees here and they serve many purposes.

Love the fruit. So do the birds and wildlife and we are happy for them to take the majority and hopefully leave the more prized fruit alone. That seems to happen.

When planting out your Mulberry tree, don’t be frightened to pick a moist spot as they like water.

Dig a good sized hole and give the tree a good head start by planting in some good rich compost.  After planting a Mulberry we would generally prune the top off to encourage it to throw out lots of branches. We fertilise the established trees once a year with our homemade compost and mulch them well.

They are a great tree to plant as they grow quickly and fruit within two or three years.

They are also very fire resistant and we have them strategically around the edge of the orchards to provide some added protection.

We prune them back heavily every year in October or November, this is after we have harvested the last mulberries of the season.

You don’t have to let them grow huge. We prune them back to about two metres tall and this keeps them very tidy, very attractive and very manageable.

The prunings provide a lot of mulch which we chop up and place under other fruit trees. 

From a pest and disease aspect they are quite hardy.

The wildlife and particularly the birds will take some but once established you will be overwhelmed with the amount of fruit.

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