Bethany Ringdal

Ok, a giant stack of questions.
-What have people done to keep mulberries at a good picking height? I saw someone above with the advice to pollard at about 6 ft. Has anyone coppiced mulberry? Other ideas?
-We have a bunch of wild sown mulberries growing in our yard, some with plentiful tasty fruit and some with no fruit at all. Anyone know what's up with that? Will cuttings from fruitful plants also be fruitful? I've heard of mulberries CHANGING SEX if they're cut back hard. What??? Wacky.
-Anyone have recommendations for a good named variety for zone 4, and where to buy it? There is so much confusing info out there it's hard to know where to start...
-How are folks doing cuttings? I'm trying to decide whether to take cuttings from my wild fruitful berries or buy a named variety and clone from there...

It would have been a good idea to leave a few for shade - I was focused on getting sun for my veggie gardens, but I could have achieved most of that goal and still had a bit of shade for my mushrooms. If this project works there's a whole different area of the yard I want to tackle, and I'll try it there.
I like your thinking--instead of destroying the unwanted plant, make it crank out a resource you can use! Maybe someday it will be worth it for me to get a chipper... in the meantime, I have to get my woodchips off site and find other purposes for my brushy stuff.

Please take photos and share your learnings! This forum has been so helpful for me in learning things that you just can't find in mainstream gardening resources. We've got to help each other learn and build up the communal knowledge base - pollinate some goodness, and this will be easier for the next generation!

What a fabulous experience! Can you tell us more about the "living mulch?" What are you growing in that mulch layer?

Next steps:
1) Keep an eye on those shoots. Hopefully they will decrease and eventually stop if I keep cutting them
2) Prepare to inoculate!
To that end, I need a little mushroom advice. This is a pretty sunny spot... anyone have a good idea of a good sun tolerant mushroom for stump culture? Candidates I've thought about:
-Hypsizigus Ulmarius, because they seem well-suited to elm (but I'm having a hard time finding spawn)
-Turkey Tail, because they're apparently more sun tolerant and a fast decomposer (but not a great edible, so boo)
-Oysters, mostly because they are readily available
I could try messing around with shade cloth, but I don't have much time and bandwidth for this project and would rather keep it simple.

Updates!
We cut and girdled the trees over the July 4 weekend. This week (about 2 weeks later) I went out there and saw that just about every cut tree was sprouting, both above and below the girdle. I'm disapointed - I had hoped that girdling would keep that to a minimum, or keep it below the girdle. I could also see on the cut end that they are starting to dry out though-- a lot less liquid coming up that way then there was a few weeks ago.
I took a sharp knife and basically gave every stump a shave. Cut off any piece of green that I could see. My idea at this point is to keep the tree from getting anymore resources through photosynthesis, and to force it to try to use up its remaining stored energy trying to send out shoots.
An accidental experiment: a few trees never got girdled, and now I'm going to leave them that way to see if the girdling is actually helpful. In my pretty unscientific observations so far, there wasn't much difference in sprouting between girdled and non-girdled trees. The biggest difference seemed to be how much sun they were getting.
We also left a few trees standing that weren't such a shade problem, and I'm going to experiment with girdling standing trees vs. cut ones as well.

Right, here are those photos then:

Hi Friends,
We're trying an experiment, and thought I'd share photos and updates along the way here in case it's useful to anyone else - or anyone else has genius insights for us.
THE PROBLEM:
When we bought our property (suburban, 4a, .3 acre) there were a lot of young trees along the fence line and in old ornamental garden areas. Mostly Siberian Elm, but also a few Ash and Mulberry. These trees are causing several problems:
-Seeding more weed trees around the property
-Damaging the fence
-Shading out the best potentially sunny area of the yard (which is otherwise shaded by giant silver maples)
We want these trees gone... but we don't want to use poison or the traumatize either the soil or our bodies. We can't get a truck or tractor into the yard to pull them out.
THE DREAM:
What if we could remove them in a way that actually benefitted the ecosystem by keeping their biomass in the soil, breaking it down into useful organic matter, and jumpstarting the soil biology? And what if we could also get a good crop from the process? We want to try to take these suckers out with MUSHROOMS.
THE EXPERIMENT:
After researching our brains out, we realized that we weren't going to find step by step instructions for this, so we combined the best of what we found and thought we'd keep the community up to date in case it's useful to anyone else. Here is our plan:
-Cut the trees (except the fruiting mulberries!) at about chest height
-Girdle them near the ground (removing a couple inches of bark and the 'juicy' layers with a sharp knife) in hopes of limiting resprouting
-Wait a while for them to dry out before using plug spawn to inoculate with mushrooms.
-Meanwhile, use the cut branches to form our first ever hugelkultur beds in the newly sunny area. Plant these with a cover crop mix and hopefully with annual veg next spring.
And here are some pictures from step 1 (we spent the 4th of July weekend declaring our independence from Siberian Elm )

My neighbors had a very high raised bed (probably 3 feet at least?) with a stone wall, with raspberries planted at the foot of it - and raspberries came up INSIDE the bed! That means those rhizomes traveled through several feet of dirt - remarkable. They only had to travel up though - I have my doubts if they could make a similar journey down and then up again.