Our main mulberry plant is really spreading out now!

There will be no dancing around the mulberry tree in our garden. Well there could be, but you’d be trampling the pumpkin vines if you did.

As you can see, our mulberry plant from Novice Gardener has taken firm root in the garden, and has consequently been growing nice, strong, long stems. A most pleasant side effect of the plant having nice, strong, long stems is the bigger quantity of mulberries that have been appearing.

A glimpse of the latest crop of mulberries currently growing.

My issue with this is that the birds keep beating me to the fruits. They sample part of a fruit and leave part on the plant, or they get so excited (or clumsy) that they knock the fruits off. (That’s one thing about mulberries – they can drop off at the slightest touch.)

So, I’ve decided to take another page from Novice Gardener’s book – to grow more plants so that I can hopefully harbour a few for ourselves – maybe cover them in netting or something.

One of the successful cuttings. I wanted long stems to give the plants more space to grow fruits if they grew. Hehe.

At my last major pruning of the plant, I kept several long, thick stems and just poked them into the nearby brinjal plant pot. (Doing cuttings the careful way doesn’t work with me because I keep forgetting to water them; sticking them in a pot with a plant I have to water or gets rained on means they’ll get watered, too.) A few died, but a few have started growing. The latter will be transplanted to individual pots and moved to other parts of the garden, as part of my little dream of being able to pluck and eat mulberries as I wander through the garden; and I’ll try to propagate more at the next major pruning, which is very soon. I guess it’s a good thing the original plant has grown so big, but once I have more mulberry plants growing in pots, I’ll probably remove it, because I’ve seen how big these plants can grow (big trees), and don’t want that where it is now. The plants with the smaller fruits have not been bearing fruits much, either, but have been contributing to the compost piles. I may keep them for that – or maybe not. We’ll see.

© 2014 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.