Do you know the reason why the wild mulberries won't fruit well? No bloom? Late freeze kill? Small fruits? Usually wild ones are tougher and I've seen trees loaded with fruits especially in fertile and sunny spots. Both of my dwarf everbearing and Pakistani mulberries are easy to root. Either as spring root suckers or summer cuttings or through air layering. I don't know how about winter cuttings. So far I only harvested a small handful of mulberries from the everbearing tree due to late freeze every year. They may not be a good choice if your weather pattern is similar.
The fruit is very small and the fruiting period is short.
I used to wonder how many mulberry trees and time people had to be harvesting enough for a pie or juice, and it's seems that select varieties is the answer.
The fruit of the Pakistani in particular are said to be inches long, where my wild ones are maybe 1/2" max.
I love theses mulberry trees anyway, but I'd probably love them more if they were producing enough food to be worth harvesting.
We are in the same zone, 6B but Cincinnati is very wet, which can apparently be a problem for some varieties.
There is a fungus that causes "popcorning" in some varieties in wet areas.
Do you live in a wet area as well?
Im looking at a dwarf variety Geraldi.
It starts fruiting very young, but grows slowly and tops out very low.
It seems to stay small even in other root stock.
I'm still looking into how well it roots.
Online pictures showing dwarf mulberries loaded with fruits are impressive. I'd like to try some in the future.
My local wild red mulberries aren't too small, maybe 1" long and if I use a tarp and beat the tree with a stick, it won't take a lot of time to harvest also.
Late winter is dry and windy here but spring is very wet. Since mulberries fruit from the laterals in late April and ripen in early June, too much rain falls can make fruits flavorless and the trees having more fungal diseases. I've seen a few berries popcorn like on the ever bearing mulberry but never on wild rubra. Another killer is the twig blight, which also spreads rapidly in cool and damp climate.
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Wild mulberry 5/28/25
Zone 6, 45 inches precipitation, hard clay soil
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