 Hello. Happy to be here at the OFA conference or rather in my car recording from outside a local business with high speed internet. Rural internet and COVID and this is the best I could come up with. So I'm, yeah, thanks for joining me. Looking forward to talking about a topic I love with you all. So without further ado, let's talk about mulberries. So I just want to give a brief overview of what this presentation is going to look like. I want to give a little background about myself and my farm, some projects I'm involved with. And then we'll get an overview of mulberry, look at a few different species, and then we'll talk about beef production, fruit production, potential diseases, and then how I'm using mulberry on my farm. And we'll brainstorm some ideas for how this might benefit all of you. So again, thanks for joining me. My name is Weston Lombard. I'm the owner of Solid Ground Farm. Solid Ground Farm is it's like a sort of research and education slash creation center. We're in Southeast Ohio, Appalachian, Hilly, Hilly land. And we do workshops and educational programs and have this experimental agroecology, agroforestry. I've been doing this for about 12 years. And I'd say I got into this idea through, I guess sort of through philosophy and like looking for purpose and meaning in my life, trying to find greater connection with nature. I just wanted to find a way that I could like interact with the outdoors in a beneficial way. So that led me to agroforestry and permaculture. I started experimenting and researching and eventually hosting workshops so that I could learn more about certain stuff. From that, I sort of developed different speaker series and weekend events and all that stuff at the farm as a way to sort of fund my farming hobby. That's grown over the years and now we offer several different programs. And most of our income actually come from renting space in the summer camp and play space elementary school. We do also we've got a CSA, we sell direct to consumer. But at this point, I'd say 10% of our income comes from actually selling produce and most of it comes from rent and rent. And that has allowed me to play around without a lot of expectation and given me freedom to explore different crops. So that's sort of how I have come to Mulberry anyway through this experiment. Briefly about the different programs we offer this youth outdoor adventure summer camp. We're trying to connect children with the outdoors, show them meaningful interactions with nature and help them build relationship land and each other. They spend a lot of time foraging through I've got forest gardens and vegetable gardens and all this. And they, you know, pick carrots and eat them and hang out under the mulberry tree. Most of the fruit on the farm actually gets by kids at the summer camp or at like we do a hundred person farm table festival. A lot of the food gets processed for that. The rest of the year, we have a place based elementary school and sort of like outdoor focused. We do projects around seasonal happenings. I run a eco entrepreneurship by new projects like make apple cider or roast chestnuts. Now we're making acorn coals and mulberry. So a lot of fun, but all of these projects together have this focus on like, I guess, building. Culture around the local sourcing of our food and basic needs. So we're trying to think of ways to interact and have a relationship with our land as if, you know, we belong there and as if we're part of we're developing our our role and how we fit with all the soil, water and plants and animals. Super experimental, super fun on this process. Like I said, I experimented with a lot of different crops, but gradually came to notice that the most productive and most consistent crop on the farm were the wild mulberries growing like underneath the walnut trees along the fence. And that was actually where we were getting the best production. So I slowly started looking at different cultivars and planting more and more trees. Eventually I applied for a SARA grant and got funding to collect local and regional cultivars and test them out on the farms. I planted probably 50 cultivars. Who knew there were so many different types of mulberry, but I've tried them all at this point and have been planting different configurations, doing different pruning methods and really trying to learn everything I can about this underappreciated crop. So that's where I'm coming from. I'm going to try to share everything I've learned and read about mulberries in this brief time. So I'm going to jump right into it here. In case you don't know, mulberry, it's a deciduous, at least intemperate climates tree from the Maraceae family. Same family as figs, breadfruit and Osage orange. These are all very vigorous adaptable trees. Mulberry is typically a diatrous, meaning it has male and female flowers on different trees. Only female trees produce something to be aware of. Male trees produce a large amount of pollen that can trigger some people to produce. Anyway, back to the tree in general. Why are we going to plant mulberry trees? I was first exposed to mulberry in literature in J. Russell Smith's book, Tree Crops, a Permanent Agriculture. He calls mulberry the king of crops without a throne. It's not yet recognized for its potential. Some of the reasons it's so great are, one, it is very vigorous growing and adapting. The mulberry is found worldwide in most areas that are not arctic. It can survive in wet soils and dry soils, on mountain tops, on most conditions. There is a species of mulberry that will survive. There are actually 200 species of mulberry worldwide and thousands of cultivars. Today, we're going to talk particularly about two species, the native Morris rubra and the imported Morris album. Adaptable, vigorous, and also very precocious, meaning it bears fruit at a young age. A grafted tree that you get from a nursery will start bearing immediately. It'll have a few fruit on it, even in the pot. Then, increasing in production, it takes about five years when it reaches good production. Then, we'll continue to increase over its life. They say a mature mulberry tree can produce and bushels. Some of the challenges are actually getting all of that fruit, but we'll talk more about that later. Delicious edible fruit, people say it resembles a blackberry. The fruit varies in flavor from bland and really sweet to tangy and complex, depending on the cultivar. It's typically soft and bruises easily. One of the reasons we don't see mulberry more commonly in a supermarket are because of its short shelf life. These are the two reasons most commonly attributed to a lack of prominence. One, that it has a short shelf life, and two, the birds love it. Two, gorge themselves and then leave purple marks all over your backyard. Beyond that, mulberry is super nutritious. It's worth growing just for its health benefits. J. Russell Smith writes about villages in the Middle East where they actually harvest mulberries in the summer, dry them to preserve them, and then eat them as almost a soul food source through the winter. They're really high in protein and all these different vitamins and minerals and can actually sustain someone as a meal on their own. This bottom picture is some mulberries that I dehydrated. They're quite delicious. You can buy them now. Their market is like a super food. Most of them come from Turkey and they're sold for like $5 to $15 an ounce. These benefits are in the fruit and the leaves are also super healthy. It's been used as a medicinal Chinese remedy for thousands of years, and there are a lot of claims as to its health. I think it's being looked at most as that anti-accident reservatrol has anti-cancer properties. I know there's research about influencing blood pressure and helping with diabetes by eating mulberry fruit and using leaf tea. It's also said to increase brown fat content in our body. So brown fat is what babies are born with. It keeps them warm and it has a lot of energy in it. Build up your stores by gorging on mulberries in the summertime. We're going to focus on Morris Alba and Morris Rubra. So Alba is the white mulberry. Don't be fooled by the name. The fruit can actually be white, pink, purple, and even red. There's often confusion about this and people sell what is labeled as Morris Rubra because it has red fruit. That's not necessarily the case. Morris Alba comes from the Himalayas and has been cultivated for thousands of years by the Chinese and later in India for silkworm production. Leaves of the sole food source of the silkworms have very high nutritional demands and they can only eat mulberry. They have a single stomach like we do. So this food, it's very digestible and very high in protein nutrients. So it's also great as a livestock and human food. Alba is interesting. It was brought to the US to try to start a silk industry in the 1600s. There's a great story about that. We went through a phase of mulberry mania where individual mulberry trees were being sold for thousands of dollars on the speculation that they would produce amazing silk. And there was a big craze that eventually burst when the silk industry didn't pan out. And that was for a number of reasons. I think labor costs in the US were too high and we just didn't have the quality control that other countries were implementing. So millions of trees were planted over that 200 year period and some places they were even mandating that every landowner had to plant mulberry trees. So these trees, the seed is easily dispersed by birds when they eat the fruit and poop it out and it has since naturalized and spread across the country. It's now considered invasive. That's I think worth a discussion. I don't want to discount Morse Alba out of hand because of its invasiveness. It's a very useful tree and it, unlike other invasives, it doesn't typically form like pure stands and it doesn't necessarily out compete native species. So while it does spread and we'll show up along fence lines and other areas that aren't road. Its main concern is that it hybridizes with the native Morse rubra and these hybrid offspring, then replace Morse rubra in the wild Morse rubra is now threatened may even not really exist in pure forms already. The most genetic testing is shown that that almost all wild specimens of Morse rubra house and Alba and at this point after 200 years of. So if you are really. concerned about introducing invasive species you should check in your area and see the status of Morse Alba if it's already there. There's not much that's going to change that, but you may not want to introduce it where it doesn't exist. However, there are it is the one that has been bred for the longest, it's called cultivated to have bigger, more productive leaves for the silk industry and these can be fed to livestock and humans. So leaf cultivars are the Alba it has smoother leaves. So when we're talking about livestock feed we're talking about Morse Alba. It's also great for people that they steam the leaves like you would break leaves like wrap them up in wrap rice and steam. Eat the eat the young ones steamed, but quite healthy and delicious. There's also a market for the root root bark is used in Chinese medicine. Alba is typically smaller, maybe growing 25 feet tall 20 feet wide. It can be, but and regrows vigorously. And it forms this really dense tree like in the picture here and even in the middle of this tree where little sunlight penetrates, it's still ripens. So that's something special about mulberries. It's like exceptional fruiting. Additionally, it fruits on all species almost every year without fail, which makes it worth growing just for that, for that reason. This was the first year in 10 years that I haven't gotten fruit. And we actually had three consecutive late frosts. So it leafed out the flowers and leaves were frozen and killed. It leafed out again and produces secondary flowers, which is very unique. Those were frozen. I leafed out again produce tertiary flowers. So it really wants to make fruit. But then those are also killed. And at this point in the summer, I think I got like three or four roots from 100 tree. So it has its limits, but it will do its best to fruit. It typically leaves out later than most fruit trees. So it's not usually an issue, but climate change, everything is pretty crazy. So again, grafted trees, rooted cuttings, they'll fruit right away. Seedling will take maybe five years before. That's Alba. This is Morris rubra, or likely a hybrid in this picture, but it's native to Ohio. These trees get quite large. They're found usually along stream banks or in forest coves. They can tolerate wet soils and can actually like be flooded in underwater for a year and then bounce back the next year if the water received over after two years, they'll die. They don't like to be, they don't like to be in the water and like a well-drained soil. But they'll uniquely tolerate alkaline soils and wet soils, and they do better in shade than Alba. The rubra, between rubra and Alba, you can almost plant in any situation. Alba likes more of the drier soils. The rubra can tolerate the wet Alba, the more acidic. The rubra has both more complex, better tasting fruit, often bigger fruit. It also has established relationships with our native ecology. So it's a very wildlife feed for about a dozen, maybe I think it's nine caterpillar species that it supports, dozens of mammals. This isn't a picture of mine, but I actually came out to a tree and there was a woodchuck in the tree out eating, I think the branch, the fruit and the leaves off the tree. So all manner of creature love mulberry fruit. They can be hard to distinguish, especially with all the hybridization. Typically, the rubra will have bigger, more deeply lobed leaves that are slightly hairy on the underside. They're duller, green and not glossy like the Alba. And you can actually go to this website and they'll do side by side comparisons. The bark is actually quite distinctly different to this grayish bark on the rubra and the Alba almost turns an orangeish color as it ages. And you saw the cut down pictures of the stump, the hardwood is actually like this very yellowish orange color. Here's a chart that shows the differences. But typical rule of thumb, if you find it in a forest, like in the middle of a forest, it likely it could be red mulberry. If you find it in town or like growing along a fence line, it's probably white mulberry. But yeah, they do have some, I think, I think differences. Red mulberry will never have white fruit, whereas white mulberry will. So which one to plant? It depends. If you're not a purist, there are more options. A lot of the hybrids are some of the best fruit producing. What I like to do is plant out red mulberry seedlings and then graft hybrids and red mulberry cultivars on. However, if I were doing it for leaf production, I would do Alba. This nigra also originating in Asia is supposed to have the best tasting fruit of all the mulberries. And this is what the mulberry orchards in Europe and the UK are of Morris nigra. And they, unfortunately, I think it's more the humidity of our winter that they don't tolerate. They can, they can do up to like six B, I think, but, but typically, I think nigra would be a gamble here. I haven't even tried it just because what I read that it wouldn't work. But maybe in certain circumstances, it'd be worth time. We weren't, we aren't going to discuss nigra anymore, but we could. Okay, so getting into mulberry leaves. Like I said, almost all livestock, I can't think of any that would not enjoy mulberry leaves from rabbits to chickens might have to dry, dry it and grind it to eat it. Pigs will strip the leaves right off of the tree, as will goats and sheep. It's often collected on the young shoots and then run through a wood shipper, and you are a shredder and you can feed that whole, all of that to cattle, they'll eat the bark and the young people compare it to alfalfa and say it's more nutritious than alfalfa. So if you're trying to compare it to something else. There's lots of studies showing it increases milk production and goats increases egg production in chickens. It's typically not fed as a as a lone food source but in combination with other, but it's a great addition. There's some studies you can check out I, I don't know a lot of the science behind it, but I do know that the leaves are very high in different minerals, nutrients and actually have a lot of protein. So they're very high quality forage how I've been using them is both for human consumption. I collect the young leaves and dehydrate them and then use them to make a drink of mulberry leaf tea every day. I'm sure it's really healthy. Who knows but it's got a pleasant taste. And fetch is a very good price. So if you just look online, it retails for seven ounces $7 an ounce. I'm sure it holds sales for a lot less but a tree makes an absurd amount of leaves. You can harvest in the tropics they harvest leaves up to like seven times a year. In temperate climates I think we can do two leaf harvestings. So you strip the tree and then it leaves out and grows again you strip the leaves again, and then it leaves out again and hardens off before winter. You can get a lot of crop from it. I'm stripping the leaves also when it leaves back out it produces food again so it's the way to stimulate a second round of fruiting as well. How we care for the mulberry depends on whether you're growing it for fruit or for leaves and as does the spacing and whatnot, which I guess I will get into momentarily after I show the proof of my statements here. This is our pet, our pet sheep enjoying mulberry leaves. So I have these growing in the pasture as like shade trees. And then I'll either just break and bend the branches down so they're in in reach, or I'll cut them and bring them into their paddock if that's the case. So these two lived mostly off mulberry leaves through this winter. Actually I cut them in the summer and bring them whole branches and what they didn't need I dried in my tree hay. But yeah so I cut it and then I just put it in the shed to dry. And it stays green and just dehydrates so it doesn't mold or spoil. They call it tree hay and you just have to like somehow get it in an area with some ventilation and it will dry out and then you can feed that all through the winter. So I've been experimenting with that and I find that they definitely relish the mulberry leaves in all seasons. Edit to pigs and sheep primarily. So leaf cultivars are very widely available in other countries. Here, most nurseries sell fruit cultivars. And these are some that I've found to be suitable, although there are definitely better ones out there. I just don't know how to access. So Kokusa is one of those bred in Korea. It has really big fruit and also really big palatable leaves. Some leaves strip really well off the tree. Kokusa actually like posts and bark with it when you strip it so it's better for like cutting the branches. Armin is another alba cultivar that has big fruit and big leaves. They're often a correlation between the two. If you want to do this on the sheep you can get more alba seedlings. And again half will be males and half will be females but all of them will have nutritious leaves. I love to get my hands on some cold, hardy leaf cultivars. I know those ones that have higher nutritional content and more protein, higher digestibility and all that, but not yet available. So for leaf production, typically they do sort of tight spacing. This is from a book on mulberry cultivation by an Indian author. This hasn't really been done in the U.S. So there's not like a lot of information on how do you grow mulberries for leaves in the U.S. So this is sort of an extrapolation from temperate India. They're doing it. They do a three by three spacing, irrigated and fertilized, and they yield six to nine tons an acre of leaves. As the soil gets less ideal, the slope steeper, you might consider a 10 micron spacing. And so with this tight spacing, you can imagine the trees, you know, 20 foot trees. How's that work? Well, you either compass it or pollute it. And these are both great strategies for they both increase the longevity, the life, lifetime of a tree, and they continuously keep it within a harvesting height and allow for multiple year after year harvest. So the first step is you plant your trees, you let them grow for a few years to get established, and then you cut them at different heights depending on what you're going for. So this is an example of a pollard. Pollarding is essentially cutting them at above livestock or deer browse so that the new growth isn't eaten off by some sort of animal. So in the few planted. Sorry, my pictures are sort of hard to see your plant in the first year prune the lower branches to try to get a straight trunk. Keep doing that in the second year. And then in the third year when you've got a, you know, four inch or so diameter tree, you cut it down at four or five feet. And then that will you cut it down. Sorry. In the winter when it's dormant. And then in the spring, it will shoot up all manner of regrowth from the top. You let these grow for a month or so, two months, and then you cut them all down and carry that to your livestock or strip the leaves off. And dehydrate them, whatever you're going to do, let it regrow. And then you can even time you can cut it again or strip the leaves again. And as long as you give it a month or two before the last frost to recover and store up energy for next year, you can do this year after year. You can obviously pull nutrients from the soil. So you'll have to fertilize and irrigate if you're doing this continuously. You can also do it once a year and have less of an impact on the land and less need. This picture is a copis system. Same idea. You're letting the tree grow and establish, put down big roots for three to four years, and then you're cutting it down at the base. This, there's systems where you can harvest mechanically that I think prefer like a copis method method. And then how you prune these, how you make the cuts is cut it down. It has all these vigorous sprouts growing. And then you cut them, not flush against the trunk, but just leaving like a, you know, a centimeter of a stub. And these, it sort of grows over time and you get this gnarly like hand looking thing. And each year it gets a little more bulbous, funny looking. So it's constantly sort of growing a little bit as your copis. And copis trees, I don't know about mulberry in particular, but copis trees can live for like thousands of years. You can continuously supply leafs or if you let it grow longer, people weave with mulberry or use the inner bark for fiber. Let it grow even longer between cutting and get big diameter polewood for firewood or fence posts even I think the heart would have more it's rubra. It's fairly rot resistant. Anyway, copising and polluting a great way to increase production. It's a turning to fruit. So this has been my main interest. The fruit, like I said, it's delicious. It's nutritious. It's very versatile on anything you can do with like blackberries or something. Like mulberries or wine, pies, jam, jellies, juices. I did a lot of smoothies. Mostly what I did was I froze a lot of fruit when I throw it in the smoothies or I did a little experiment with dehydration. I want to get a, it'd be nice to find a system that was outdoor. I use a lot of energy and takes like 12 hours in a commercial dehydrator to dehydrate it. But then they're shelf stable. A great thing to do. So fruit is ideal for humans and livestock, particularly pigs and chickens. So I've experimented with this, and I have found that the animals will hang out under the mulberry trees waiting for the fruit to drop. And then do a great job of cleaning it up and and fattening themselves on its production. Kids, of course, love mulberries. We talked a little bit about the challenges, birds, short shelf life. So really harvesting it for market or something, I would hand pick it directly into the sale containers and then like take it that day or the next day to be sold. And tell consumers to eat it, you know, right away, pretty much the most reasonable thing I think is to do a you pick where people come and eat it directly from. So to do this. It's important to keep the trees small. Morris rubra can grow up to 75 feet, if not pruned. So there's going to be and it's vigorous grows a lot each year. So there's going to be a lot of a lot of pruning, which means a lot of leaves to share and a lot of wood to burn. So it's a very giving and productive tree. And you have to do what you can to keep it, keep it small and within reach. Another interesting thing about mulberry is it's ripening window. So a typical mulberry tree might have a two to three week ripening window where every day. A little bit of fruit ripens over three weeks. Some hybrids called ever bearing cultivars will ripen small batches continuously for maybe three months, or maybe they'll have a season in June and then they'll have another little season in in August or something. And if you plant a lot of different cultivars, you can have a really long mulberry season lasting from June through August is the harvesting. And then with like one cultivar now cook pizza is the one that they sort of ripen together over a two week period. So here's just some kids at the camp on doing what they do every day of pick up. So you can see this there's quite a bit of fruit on each on each tree. Yeah, so it's very it's very productive. And again, I love the taste mulberries are delicious. Let's look at how we're going to train and prune them for food. So this is sort of what I've been going for is branches spreading out that I can walk under the fruit hangs underneath, and I want to be able to walk all around the tree, or at least bend the branches down where I can, where I can reach. So I've achieved that primarily through bending the branches so I sort of take them and like crimp them as I go. And I've noticed that that albacult of ours respond well to bending and they're quite pliable. Occasionally with the rubra, I end up like whooping they tear at a crotch and break when I try to bend them. They're less conducive to bending. I don't know if that's true generally across the species but that's in my observation. So bending helps keep them horizontal and promote this like lateral growth and pre production. So what ends up happening though is when you bend the branch and the next year it shoots up a bunch of vertical growth above that. So that has to constantly be managed. So they can be multi-stem just trying when they're young to create this shape. And then I can sort of leave the scaffold structure and just do annual or biannual pruning to keep it small like this. So I've got another diagram I've drawn as well. So first thing you want to do is get it at the branches sort of above a deer brow tight. So you prune it up to a straight whip cut off the young branches and then a heading cut at the top will encourage it to send out a lot of branches right at the tip of the tree. And then those you want to bend over to create this nice scaffolding. And that can be done by here people use bamboo or two by fours to tie the branches to and try to get down. I've seen people hang weights or cinder blocks from the trees to bring them down and you can also do that bending mechanism. And so after that is established and every year it'll send up these vertical shoots. And what I've been experimenting with is letting the tree fruit. So in June, I'll come into harvest the fruit and I'll just cut the vertical growth, pull it down, take the fruit off, and then I can feed the branches to the livestock. And that sort of keeps the tree from taking off vigorously up in the air. And if you do that every year on cutting out the vertical growth, it will keep sending up the suckers every year. It'll need that, but it'll also really develop strong lateral branches that you leave. Even downward facing branches will grow a lot of fruit like mother called mother fruit. What I've seen a lot of people doing in Asian countries is developing these mulberry tunnels. So it's essentially maybe 10 to 15 foot spacing and you're training the branches in towards each other. And then you walk underneath harvest as you go. So that'd be really great for a you pick is creating one of these mulberry tunnels. Another great way I've seen this done is managing it. More like that copper system where you have a multi stem trunk that you're periodically cutting back so you make half, half the shoots one year, and then half the shoots the next year. So you're just continuously keeping it small, but allowing an amount of it to to harvest. But that is the biggest challenge is you want to keep it small so that you can harvest the fruit. What cultivars are best for fruit production. As part of my Sarah grant, I wrote a booklet that contains a lot of this information. I need to update it to both of ours that did well during that period we've since had some really cold winters and they have died. So here's a list of cultivars suitable for like zone five that I've really liked. My favorite is actually a local one that I got from our farmers market manager named Kit Parker. So it's like a rubra hybrid. It has really complex tasting fruit, it's long, maybe an inch and a half long, and it has a tangy complex flavor and is very prolific ripens over a long window so it's like an ever bearing. And I've been grafting on to a lot of my wild seedlings. So whenever, you know, I find a wild tree growing I'll take a scion and graft female variety on to it so I get so I get the standard is Illinois ever bearing it's very cold hardy produces tasty big fruit. Um, if you know anyone who's growing mulberry has heard of Illinois ever bearing silk hope is from a town called silk hope in North Carolina is introduced by a J ballard, the late a J ballard he recently passed away he was like our regional mulberry expert, you know very diverse mulberry orchard. He introduced silk hope and thought it was the most promising mulberry cultivar a lot like Illinois ever bearing, maybe slightly bigger, maybe slightly better tape. Very similar. Uso is that Korean Korean cultivar that ripens precipitously, it's got big black fruit, maybe even bigger than silk hope. I like it both because it has big nutritious leaves and it's good fruit production, and it ripens all at once you just done with the season quickly. The dwarf is my favorite, but it keeps dying on me when the temperature dips below negative 15 degrees. So it's not quite ideal for us, but it has a short inter nodal distance this picture is already dwarf so it has a lot of fruit and a small space, and it doesn't get as big as other all varies. Very good flavor, very big fruit, naturally small tree. So if you're in like zone six, I would try a Gerardi dwarf right all around. Carmen, if you want a white fruit variety, which the birds tend to leave alone more Carmen I think has the biggest, a best tasting of the white fruited ones that will grow in our area. So it comes from is also cold hardy. It comes from Canada I believe earlier is super cold party as well. So anywhere north, north of where I am zone zone five and up the most cold hardy to my knowledge or Illinois ever bearing in Collier, and I imagine capturing Carmen in from Canada also. This is a great website. It has information on each cultivar and everything like to know about mulberry so that's from Mark Travis, and this is a picture from that website as well. So I was under the impression that mulberry was mostly pest and disease free, which was one of the benefits of planting it I've since learned that nothing is truly without pests and diseases, especially in southeast Ohio with our humidity. And especially when you start planting a bunch of things together so that was one of the drawbacks of bringing all berries from all over the country and planting them together on my farm is that pest and diseases started showing up on 10 caterpillars. You know you can just scoop them off and smash them. The birds eat the eat the fruit deer love the leaves different caterpillars love the leaves. However they always bounce back like leaf defoliation is not a big, big issue. The more problematic ones are the borers, which I've been educated that the borers should not be a problem. Have healthy trees that are well irrigated and mulched and cared for that has not been my style of growing. I've planted a lot of things, sort of letting nature take its might not be the best strategy. And so I have started getting some border damage they drill into the end of the bark and eat the can be I'm going to eventually kill three. And words problem I've had show up is this very I'm canker that's been here. It's a fungal disease that spreads by wind and insects and sort of enters leaf scars or areas where the bark has been damaged. You can spread it by pruning. It starts to eat the eat the cambium form these sunken cankers and will eventually spread around the entire branch until it girls it and kills anything above it. So if that happens on the trunk, it can kill the whole tree. And then you cut back to fusarium canker is first identifying it, and then you cut back since six inches below it and burn or those of the wood in a sanitary way. So I have now found this in most of my trees and I've been cutting a lot of them down or cutting them back. Unfortunately, but if you get it early. It's no big deal you cut it out. And just get rid of it whenever you see it. Here are pictures of the boards mulberry trees they tend to bleed when you cut them. So a lot of sap comes out. So that the little you see little holes and then those holes bleed. And then that sap tends to mold and turn this black white color. But the real damage is inside where those little beetles are eating, eating the inner layer of cambium. So one could potentially spray something toxic on them, or you can cut down three on this thing about cutting down mulberry tree is that next year it grows right back and you got a tree again. So not a huge loss. Okay, so a lot of information to digest there I know how are we going to use this on our farms on low hanging fruit like the easy applications are if you have an existing orchard. Interplant between them with mulberry it tolerates park shade. So can fruit underneath the overstory tolerate it tolerates jug loan from black walnut. So it's particularly good as like a interplant with large nut trees if you got a test nut orchard or walnut orchard or something like that even oaks and hickory is it can do well in between each tree. Another benefit you'll get from it in addition to the increased production is that if you let the leaves fall and decompose, rather than feeding them to the livestock it's a ton of organic matter it's really nutrient rich, and it will like build organic matter in your soil and kickstart the biology down there. So great for that. There's a there's a myth that the Chinese held back the goby desert by planting mulberries along the edge and just leaf fall would keep away the certification by holding in moisture and building organic matter. And also I've read a study about how there are bacteria living on the leaves that as water falls on the leaves these nitrogen fixing bacteria drip off the leaves into the soil and actually add nitrogen. Good good anecdotally, I read that it's a good companion plant for apples to probably for those same reasons of building, building organic matter. So I do in my system I've got in between every fruit tree there's a mulberry tree. I've recently planted just a small 200 tree that I'm going to try to make into a mulberry tunnel and do a you pick. I think that's a great small farm activity you can have an acre of you pick mulberry that you train to a mulberry tunnel. Root is really high value, in fact it's a good price you can additionally sell the leaves and feed any excess planting it exclusively for livestock is also not a bad idea. So here's a semi dwarf apple tree, and then a grafted mulberry sort of below it. And so in both directions, they'll be mulberry on all four sides of that apple tree. And my orchard is pretty diverse so it's like a lot of Asian pears and heirloom apples all interspersed. So for livestock. He me planted in the orchard. It's a great shade tree very dense shade. The fruit fall will be enjoyed by by poultry. And by by pigs on the leaf fall even the leaves when they fall in autumn are are still nutritious and will be gobbled up by by pigs or goats. So just having a tree in a pasture is a benefit for a number of reasons, food production trade. Increasing the soil biology all that. But I like that you have this planting up a plot of it and polluting it and carrying that to the livestock or dehydrating it as a winter feed source. mulberry does, you know, help old soil in place so this could be done on a hillside where you can't grow hay necessarily, and just on on generally degraded soil mulberry can tolerate that. And so having a patch for water production is a great idea. Let's see some chickens eating mulberries here. mulberry is a particularly good livestock plant because it tolerates high nitrogen content of like fresh chicken newer or fresh pig newer and readily sucks that up and converts it back to use and a lot of plants won't get that hot, hot compost. But mulberry loves it. Other other little ideas I've had. I've been planting around my livestock fences, sort of future replacement posts, every 10 feet around the perimeter of my fence I put a mulberry on these could later be polluted and fed grown directly over the fence into the pasture. And then when, when my fence pokes wrought out in 20 years I'll have a new established Fenthrough already in place is bring my fence along that. I don't know if we mentioned spacing for fruit production. I like about a 10 foot spacing if you're going to keep them small. If you're just going to let a tree grow. It's more like 25 foot spacing because it will get big. As you saw in the video with the chickens the trees get quite large. And if they aren't pruned, most of the fruit will be lost to birds, or will fall on the ground for livestock. I get a lot of calls from people who have read my Sarah project online and then want, want to know how to establish them all very orchard or that sort of thing. The method I prefer is feedlings are very cheap. You can get them for $2 a piece and out 500 seedlings. Two to three years later you can come through and graft them all to cultivars. What I would do is I would probably at the same time I planted seedlings, I would select a dozen cultivars and the, you know, three years later which cultivars are performing the best. And then you'll have the scion wood from those trees to cut and graft on to. I like to do a bark inlay graft. When the trees have like part of the leaf out in the early. I think there's a market for leaf tea business domestically. Mulberry is great. Here's a bunch of resources I've compiled there's some videos of orchards in other countries. I have not found a domestic mulberry orchard. Other than AJ bullets. I know I know they're out there but there doesn't seem to be a commercial mulberry farm yet. You could burst. Yeah, these are a lot of documents and resources. I recently started a Facebook group for temperate mulberry growers. There's a lot of knowledgeable knowledgeable people on there. So I encourage you to join. Reach out to me by email or phone with questions. I'm always happy to help. Here's some nurseries that I support and have purchased from. Our bezons nurseries out there that these guys have have the cultivars I've listed. And again, if you find my Sarah research project online, take those cultivars with the grain of salt hoping to update that point. Here's my contact information. I'm happy to answer questions. Sorry again for being in my car here. Thanks for having me. I'll talk to you later. Thanks for watching everybody. I'm happy to answer any questions if you have anything else on your mind. Thanks for a great presentation. I'd heard long ago that you could take a branch from a mulberry tree and stick it in the ground and you'd have a new tree. Is that accurate? So that is accurate if you live in a temperate area with with a tropical area with different mulberry cultivars. There are some that root here, but it's it's it's more difficult than in warmer climates. I've had I've had limited success and only with certain cultivars. They do root fairly well from softwood cuttings taken in my early summer. There was a question in the chat about maybe dipping them in a rooting hormone. That definitely helps. But still it's like each cultivar is a little different and how well it roots. And a lot of them don't root well from hardwood cuttings. Although, you know, I hear people getting 10% success from rooting Illinois ever bearing, for example. But but much higher higher success rates with with the softwood cuttings and still using a rooting hormone on those as well. I'll ask another one. I apologize if you said this and I missed it. How do you sex the trees? Yeah, so you can't sex them until they start to flower, which could take a few years from a seedling. And the flowers, they're sort of similar looking. But if you look closely at them, it becomes easy to distinguish. I don't know that I can describe it very well, but you'd have to look at a side by side picture online. But the male flowers sort of look more like they're like little tiny flowers that open and distribute pollen. Female ones look more like immature fruit, like if you can imagine this like really tiny green mulberry fruit. But they're pretty, they look quite similar if you if you don't have a comparison. Sounds like sexing chickens. Yeah, it's not as bad as chickens. Listen, there are a few more questions in the chat. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. So the best way to start them. If you're trying to do it yourself, they do start well from seeds. You've got to stratify the seed. I haven't actually had a ton of luck with this. I tried freezing them and saving them for the next year and then they did not germinate. I hear they're supposed to germinate well. Cuttings are an option. Mostly what I do is I buy seedlings. I plant out a bunch of them and then a few years later I graft onto those just to save money. The fastest way is to buy a grafted tree, but you'll end up paying $20 to $25 where you can get seedlings for like $2 a piece. And then rooting the softwood cuttings is another option. Someone asked about the living fence concept, mulberry or black locus. I've done that both with black locus, like planting for replacement fence posts and I'm experimenting with willow. I think they all will do great. The best would probably be a mixture of several species including mulberry. You'll get different nutrients and have a more diverse supply. You don't need more than one. Would you recommend using multiple of the species when creating your orchard male and female of each? Obviously you can buy them for specific reasons, but is the more diversity better or will it hinder the purpose? So that you don't need a male tree to get fruit. The fruit will actually be seedless if there aren't any males present. Although it's wind pollinated so it can blow in from anywhere. But if you're going for fruit production you might as well just do all females. And yeah, it's nice to have a diversity of cultivars just in that longer ripening window and different flavors and all that. But there's no need to have a male. The pollen can actually be sort of noxious. There's a ton of pollen and it bothers some people's allergies. And a cool fact that the male flowers release the pollen at half the speed of sound. So it really like explodes it out into the air. It can be hard to tell what kind of mulberry if you already have one on your farm. I check out that North Carolina article on comparing rubra to alba. But again, if it's if it's sort of a mature tree, you can look at the bark and like the fissures between the bark on a alba will be the sort of like orangish yellow color. And it just looks it looks sort of yellow generally the roots are super yellow. Whereas with the rubra the bark is is darker. Alba again has these like really glossy bright green leaves and rubra has sort of a dollar green, a little bit of hairiness on the leaf. But telling the civic cultivar, if it's a wild tree, it's probably just a seedling. And so, you know, it won't it won't have a name. In the chat someone's asking about propagating from male and female trees. So what I do is I find the female trees that I like the fruit from in the winter you cut off on the little shoots of like one year old growth. And you can store it in like a zip lock bag in your in your refrigerator until early summer. And then you graft onto the males by cutting them down and you'll have to watch a video on how to do a bark in like math, but then you can convert the male into a female in that way. So if you have fruit that you like growing in the neighborhood or on a tree, you can use that to propagate to other trees. Often they do the best like the local cultivars are obviously well adapted to your situation so they're worth growing. So the rootstock the gender of the rootstock doesn't matter. Once you've got over it it doesn't matter but any any branches that come out from below the graph will still be the old variety. So you can either just keep pruning those off or you know if you let those get away they'll they'll continue to be the male the male flowers and all that.