A pair of mulberries on the plant from Novice Gardener …the day before a bird discovered (and ate) them…

It’s been three years since I first introduced the mulberry plant to our garden, and the main thing I’ve learned about it is that it likes tough love.

You don’t have to coddle it and feed it constantly with fertilizers.

You can transplant it, breaking the tap root, and it will keep growing with gusto once it has recovered from the shock. I’ve done this a few times…

If you want it to produce fruits more often, you have to prune it ruthlessly. Me, I haven’t quite reached “ruthless” yet, but I do trim away the greenery fairly regularly.

It does need sufficient water, which I’ve been a bit negligent about, at times – and that’s why it’s probably best if I let it take root in the garden.

A visual comparison of the fruit from our first mulberry plant on the left, and Novice Gardener’s plant on the right. The one on the left is like a Tic-Tac while the one on the right is almost the size of a jellybean. What a difference in size!

I recently came across a video on YouTube about propagating the mulberry plant (go to around 1:13 for a close up of the clusters of fruits). What caught my attention was the mulberry tree in the video – it was absolutely loaded with fruits!

The mulberry tree in our neighbourhood…

This made me take a closer look at the mulberry tree in the neighbourhood – it really is a tree, at least 3 to 5 metres high. It recently was in season, and had quite a number of clusters of fruits.

One of the fruit clusters on the neighbourhood mulberry tree

If our plants produce these numbers of fruits, I’d plant them out to grow in the garden – but I would have to remember to prune them to keep them at a suitable height. Hmm… I suppose I could start with one test case first…

© 2013 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.