Gadenin日本語Get the appThe year at a glance
Almost all the work on a mulberry falls into four periods, and between them the tree genuinely wants to be left alone. The dates depend on your climate, so the table below is written by the tree's own stages rather than by the calendar. Watch the tree, not the month.
| Stage | Main jobs | Do not |
|---|---|---|
| Deep dormancy, leafless and cold | Structural pruning, remove dead wood, winter wash for scale, plant new trees | Feed; disturb the shallow roots |
| Bud swell to leaf out | Mulch the root zone, remove tree ties that have tightened | Cut anything; the sap is rising |
| Flowering and fruit set | Watch for green fruit drop, begin deep watering if dry | Prune; feed with nitrogen |
| Fruit swelling to first color | Deep soak weekly in dry weather, net small trees, clear ground under the canopy | Water once coloring starts |
| Picking, four to six weeks | Shake onto a sheet daily, freeze the surplus, remove diseased fruit | Leave fallen fruit on paving |
| After the crop, late summer | Light tidying cuts, clear all fallen fruit, rake affected leaves | Take out large limbs |
| Leaf fall | Rake leaves, check for wounds still weeping, plan winter pruning | Prune heavily into cold wet weather |
Winter: the only time for real pruning
Deep dormancy, when the tree is fully leafless and the weather is cold, is the one window for structural work. This is when you lift the canopy over a path, remove a crossing limb, take out dead wood, and shape a young tree. Keep the cuts small and take no more than about a quarter of the canopy in any one winter. Sap has begun to rise long before the buds visibly swell, so finish before there is any sign of movement.
This is also the season to plant a new tree, to root-prune or repot a container specimen, and to apply a winter wash if scale insects built up during the year. Do not feed. On grafted trees, pull off any suckers around the base while you can see the trunk clearly.
Spring: hands off, mulch on
Once the sap is moving, put the saw away until after the crop. The useful spring jobs are all at ground level: spread two to three inches (5 to 8 cm) of compost or bark over the root zone out to the drip line, keeping it clear of the trunk, and clear grass and weeds from a three-foot (90 cm) circle around young trees.
Check tree ties on staked trees and loosen any that have started to bite into the bark; a tie left tight for a season can girdle a fast-growing young trunk. Aphids on the shoot tips need nothing. If shoot extension last year was under eight inches (20 cm) or the leaves are small and pale, this is the only moment in the year to apply a balanced feed.
Early summer: the watering window
From fruit set until the first berries begin to color is the one stretch where water changes the size of your crop. In dry weather give a deep soak of fifteen to twenty gallons (60 to 80 L) every week to ten days. Green fruit dropping in quantity is the signal that you left it too late. As soon as the fruit starts turning red, stop watering, because water at that point dilutes the flavor and splits the skins.
This is also the time to get netting onto a small or wall-trained tree, before the birds find the first colored berry rather than after. Clear paving and move anything you care about out from under the canopy now: once the drop starts, it does not pause.
Picking season and the clear-up
The crop ripens over four to six weeks and the tree drops fruit continuously through that whole period. Shake a sheet under one or two limbs each morning and freeze what you cannot eat the same day. Sweep or gather fallen fruit off any hard surface daily, because trodden pulp stains far worse than fresh fruit does. Remove any berry showing swollen pale segments and bin it rather than composting it.
When the last fruit has dropped, do a thorough clear-up under the canopy: every fallen berry you remove now is less disease and fewer fruit flies next year. Late summer, with warm weather still to come, is a safe second window for small tidying cuts, so this is the moment to shorten a shoot that is heading the wrong way or to take off a branch that has been dropping fruit on the path. Keep those cuts small; the large ones wait for winter.
What to write down each year
Four dates make the whole year predictable: bud break, first ripe fruit, last fruit dropped, and the day you finished the winter pruning. Add a line on whether you watered and how often, and a note of which limb you removed. Mulberries are remarkably consistent once mature, so by the third year those dates let you plan the messy weeks in advance, know when to move the car and take down the washing line, and see at a glance whether the years you watered through fruit set really did give you a better crop than the years you did not.