Benefits of mulberries for food, medicine, etc.

Hello there! Wanna find out how we use mulberry for tea, medicine, etc just as the Indians, Chinese and others in this present day. Found our it helps improve eyesight, lungs and things like that. I have a mulberry tree in my backyard and community farm and I eat mostly the berries. Please let know any ways you all use mulberry on a daily basis. Take care.

I just pruned a branch of the mulberry that grows alongside my driveway.
I took all the green branches and bundled them, then hung them up to dry.
I've never enjoyed any of the fresh leaves I've tried,but the dried are more palatable.

I was able to use  green branches as binding for the bundles.
The branch splits as it's wound around the bundle, but the back stays attached.
For a tighter result,after a few turns around one end of the bundle,split it(the bundle) into two bundles and force the binding branch through that gap, over the end of the bundle and through the gap again.
Repeat until your binding runs out  and hang the resulting split bundle over a wire clothesline.

Here's a close up:

Are those the leaves use to dry for tea? What are other ways we use for the bark?

We use the dried leaves as an iced tea year round. It also helps with blood pressure and minor blood sugar issues. (No full blown diabetes here.)


We prune our tree sometime after the berries are done. Then we let the leaves dry a bit on the branches propped against something for a few days. The leaves will strip off the branches much easier then. Next we put them in the greenhouse to finish drying. Our tree seems to get a virus? fungal issue? in late summer, so we can't wait too long to harvest. My region is far too humid to bundle branches together. All I got when I tried that was a moldy mess. I so wish it wasn't so.

I could use dry leaves for tea to relieve myself from intense blood pressure. Wanna find out if we could protect the native red mulberry from interbreeding with the non native white one which overlaps its true gene and affect the identity of the plant. Do we have to keep the white mulberry in check to save the native one?

It's been years since I last dried mulberry, and I can't remember how I did it last time.
It's very humid here as well, so I might have trouble with my bundles.

I was planning on using the leaves in pesto and saving the stems for rabbit hay.
Tea sounds easier than pesto, tasty too.
Do you sieve out the particles or drink them along with the tea?

Never used mulberry in any other way except eating the berries. My weather in Chicago has been cool at times and sometimes hot. Which part of the country you're from and has it always been that humid?

It might be too late to protect native reds from being contaminated, since we have been importing white mulberry trees to the states since the 1600s and mulberries are pretty  promiscuous.

William wrote:Do you sieve out the particles or drink them along with the tea?

I like my tea to be liquid, so I do seive them out. I once tried something as a chewy tea. Didn't like it. Decided I'm not that hard up for nutrition yet. If I was more organized, I could throw the used leaf bits n a soup, or scramble them with eggs. But, ummm, no.

Joylynn you got me chuckling over here!
I'm sure the lees from you tea are at least a good boost to the compost!

This reminds me of another potential use for mulberry leaves.
If they can be made into pellets or flakes they might be suitable animal feed.
I've heard chickens ignore alfalfa pellets, but animal that like them would probably like mulberry pellets.
Honestly, this could be a good way to store the leaves for consumption by man, beast or soil.
A Von Bachmayr drum is a diy machine for making seed balls in mass, and it could be cheap way to make mulberry pellets.

Concerning the berries...
My fruiting mulberries are all volunteers and their fruit is rather small, so harvest a significant amount is a pain in the tuckuss.
I'm considering ways to rig a sheet for collecting them, because there is no clear ground under their limbs.

How do y'all harvest your trees?
Do you have wild plants or improved varieties?
Do any of you  eat the unripe fruit?

Here's a link to an eat the weeds entry on mulberry:
https://www.eattheweeds.com/mulberry-glucose-controlling-hallucinogen-2/

The Green Dean, creator and author of Eat The Weeds has an entry on Paper Mulberry, which is a related species.
It has orange pompom fruits and the inner bark can be made into Tapa cloth, the standard cloth in Hawaii before colonization:
https://youtu.be/o1wFRzp05qk?si=W8sopUMPhkspNZy3

Here is the eat the weeds entry for it :
https://www.eattheweeds.com/broussonetia-papyrifera-paper-chase-2/

So can our regular mulberries graft onto paper mulberry?
David the Good asked the same question here:
https://permies.com/t/34595/graft-Morus-nigra-black-mulberry

He also tried it himself, and it failed.
I've found no examples of success 🤷

Hi!  Here in central texas, mulberries can be found native and naturalized, the red/white varieties.  There is one in Boerne that is HUGE, like oak tree huge, full of berries, it is amazing.  But, I digress.  I bought a red mulberry (not sure if it was standard red or the Texas red variety).  It will come up as volunteers all over the place, which I've been able to dig up and plant elsewhere, grow in pots to sell/give away, etc.  I am an herbalist, it's uses are that the whole plant can be used, root to leaf for a variety of reasons, also the bark can be used I believe as an anti-parasitic.  I use the leaves like blackberry leaves.  

This year I was successful at pruning at the right time (February here), and it produced more fruit, smaller and lower branches made it much easier to harvest.  Here, it usually fruits twice, sometimes thrice a year.  

Some fun anecdotes--it's hard to kill once established in the right place!  The oldest one did die back 4 years ago with an extremely low temp freeze for this area, and it grew back.

I planted a volunteer opposite my oldest red, and it turned into a white variety.  I'm not sure how this is happening, but I have several volunteers I've cultivated all over my yard, and it seems that I have two whites and several reds.  Could this be coincidence with birds bringing white seeds into my yard?  I have no idea.

The other fun discovery is that when I pruned back in Feb. I used the cuttings to make an arch for a rose vine.  It was poorly connected at the arch so that part came down in a thunderstorm with freak high winds, but I noticed at the base the mulberry is leafing out. So much fun!

I have also made brown paper from old mulberry bark that I had lying around, and look forward to trying green bark next pruning.  From what I've heard from a tree guy here---the paper mulberry fruit wasn't his fave and he's bummed he got the wrong variety!

As you can tell, I'm a huge fan of Mulberry, and other self-seeding fruits!!

Blake Lenoir wrote:Hello there! Wanna find out how we use mulberry for tea, medicine, etc just as the Indians, Chinese and others in this present day. Found our it helps improve eyesight, lungs and things like that. I have a mulberry tree in my backyard and community farm and I eat mostly the berries. Please let know any ways you all use mulberry on a daily basis. Take care.

Seventy plus years ago we would harvest the Mulberry tree and my mother would make a Mulberry pie from them. The stems are the problems on these so it would probably be better to cook the berries and then filter out all the stems and make a Jam or Pie from the filtered meat of the berries.\

I currently have one large Mulberry tree in my backyard. It was there when I bought the property. It makes some good bird feed!!!     When I mow I do try and get a few pulled and eat them right there, but, a warning. There is a LOT of junk being spewed out from Chem Trails, so WASH THOSE BERRIES BEFORE ANY PROCESSES to clean off as much of that as possible. That holds true for ANY GARDEN PRODUCE that you might want to eat, especially those nice ripe tomatoes!

What's up! Wanna find out if there are any true native mulberries available at any nursery and I'm talking about American ones. Anybody know of any sources for American mulberries to help restore the native population and keep the non native in check? How could we separate the non native vs the true native?

Blake Lenoir wrote:What's up! Wanna find out if there are any true native mulberries available at any nursery and I'm talking about American ones. Anybody know of any sources for American mulberries to help restore the native population and keep the non native in check? How could we separate the non native vs the true native?

Sure - just look online for “morus rubra for sale”. Cold stream farm nursery has them, and others as well. I don’t know how likely any place is to have them “pure”, ie not hybridized, but I did read that in most places the red and white mulberries have different bloom times, so maybe it is less likely than we think.
Just a note - planting red mulberries won’t really keep white mulberries “in check”. White mulberries grow well in disturbed soil, so don’t really occupy the same niche as red mulberries. They aren’t directly competing. All for planting more of them though!

Just wanna find the red one to help native wildlife locally and restore my community's ecological past.

Hey, Blake. I just stumbled on Judson Carroll's post on mulberry trees and their herbal uses from his book, here. There is a link there as to how to buy his books in the same post too.

Leaves for tea, yes. Berries, delicious, a bit of a pain to harvest. But my favorite, the leaves are a high protein chicken fodder( can't recall the %). For easy clean up cut green twigs about 3 feet long, toss em to birds, pick up bare sticks later. Oh, don't forget mulberry wine.......

Ate a few handfuls today. Just coming into full berry season. I had a huge tree that I cut down due to being too close to the house. But it is now a large coppice bush with lots of berries, so a big win. Mulberries are just a weed around here, they are so common and grow everywhere, and very hard to kill.

I use mulberry wood to make handles for tools like shovels.

Could mulberry wood be also be used to build furniture and other things? What's it good for?

One more thing to ask. Has anyone tried to make mulberry silk before?

I have a black mulberry. They grow well here on the West Coast.  I use the mulberry leaves as green leafy vegetables. I just slice them thin after rolling many types of greens into a cigar shape. The French call this process chiffonade.  The berries have resveratrol in them. That's the thing that makes red wine healthy. (It's not the alcohol!).  They are also high in antioxidants.  In general, the darker and smaller the berry, the more nutrition it has.  The most concentrated part of most fruits is the outside,so small berries have more surface area.

John S
PDX OR

Blake Lenoir wrote:Could mulberry wood be also be used to build furniture and other things? What's it good for?

I've read that it is nearly as rot resistant as black locust.
I harvest lots of poles from min, but I have yet to use them.
If you bend them while they are still green, they dry in that shape, which could be great for hoop houses.
They would probably be even better if you split them first.
They are also good fire wood.

Anybody tried some dry mulberries and had them in cornbread before?

I use mulberry to feed my silk worms. That is their primary food source. They then, in turn, give me beautiful silk for spinning and weaving.

I think that the preferred food of silk worms is the leaves of the white mulberry.  I don't find their fruits to be interesting, so I don't grow that variety.
More power to those who like those fruits, the leaves for veg, and the leaves for silk worm food.
John S
PDX OR

Hi Nancy,

Welcome to Permies.

Nancy Jackson wrote:I use mulberry to feed my silk worms. That is their primary food source. They then, in turn, give me beautiful silk for spinning and weaving.

Fascinating!
Can you tell us more about your operation?

Are there any domestic silkworms to create our own silk? And could that silk be used for blankets, towels, clothes and pillows?