Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

They're very tough trees- amazingly green in very harsh environments!

According to one estimate, a total of approximately1.2 billion hectares of land in the world is degraded, barren or marginal and its proportion is increasing every year. Mulberry is an ideal tree species for economic management of unutilised wasteland (under rainfed conditions) for the following reasons:
• It is tap rooted with minimum superficial roots
• It has good coppicing power and is tolerant to lopping and pruning. Pruning and training of mulberry enhances the size and quality of leaves.
• It has easy generation capacity through seeds and vegetative means.
• It is a multipurpose tree which yields fodder, fibre, fruit, wood etc. The leaves are highly palatable and nutritious for livestock, and these are used extensively for silk production.
• Many varieties of mulberry are available which can grow in varied agro-climatic conditions in both temperate and tropical areas.
Mulberry has a potential to play a valuable role in world agriculture. It is an extremely versatile plant which can fulfil a number of roles in smallholder agricultural production. Its value is multifaceted and the potential for increasing and diversifying its use is enormous. However, its value and benefits as high quality supplements to low quality roughages in ruminant feeding sys-tems have neither been widely known nor fully exploited. There is a wide genetic diversity in this species. It is a species of wide-ranging soil and climatic adaptation - a large number of pro-vanances are available which grow under different soil and climatic conditions. Systematic stud-ies are warranted to: evaluate these provenances in order to know the superior genotypes, collect and maintain germplasm, and conduct agronomy and management studies (e.g. environmental adaptation; establishment and propagation; defoliation management of tree; planting density, cutting intervals and cutting heights in intensive forage production systems; seed production) in different agroforestry systems (e.g. agrisilviculture, agrisilvi-horticulture, silvipasture, energy plantation, boundary plantation, alley cropping and perennial cropping). This will improve bio-mass production with high nutrients for livestock feeding and extend ecological range of the plant. The future role and value of mulberry will depend on the outcome of these programmes

Another +++ for the Mulberry tree from me.

My folks have one at their place in the outer northern suburns of Melb and it grows great. Would be about 3-4m tall now and has huge amounts of fruit with no additional watering.

The chooks love the berries too.

AJ

Some producers use mangles, kale and even tree forage, such as mulberry or persimmon, as poultry feed.

Is that what they call "hard pruning"?

Mulberry leaves, meanwhile, are rich in the bioflavinoid rutin, which is good for capillaries and blood vessels. The plant first appears in a Chinese medical text called Pen Tsao Kang Mu, or "The Great Herbal," which was compiled by Li Shih-chen in 1578. It describes the mulberry leaf as tasting sweet yet bitter and having a cold nature......

..... Japanese and Chinese people used to believe that mulberry leaves were a medicine that could lead to immortality. Today, experts still study the medicinal attributes of the plant. As recently as the 1990s, a Japanese study concluded that the mulberry leaf was anticarcinogenic. Another study determined that the leaf was as effective as ginseng in slowing aging. It has been reported that it can do such things as stabilize the nervous system, relieve emotional strain and reduce harmful elements accumulated in the skin and organs.

Abstract
Mulberry leaf is commonly used for sericulture in almost every part of the world but its potential to be utilized for human consumption is not well recognized. This paper deals with development of mulberry leaf powder and its use with wheat flour to develop paratha, the most common food item of breakfast and dinner in the Indian diet. The optimum ratio of the mulberry leaf powder and wheat flour (MLP-WF) mix for preparation of paratha on the basis of sensory quality was found to be 1:4. The protein quality of the MLP-WF mix was estimated by measuring the Protein Efficiency Ratio, and was found to be 1.82 against a casein diet for which a value of 2.44 was observed. The in vivo toxic effect of mix was studied and no adverse effect on the growth of internal organs of rats (heart, liver, kidney and testes) was found. The storage stability of the mix was estimated for a period of 2 months in polyethylene bags at room temperature. A non-significant difference was observed between paratha prepared from fresh and stored mix. This indicated that mix can be stored for a period of 2 months at room temperature without loss of quality.

Mulberry Leaf Juice
Mulberry trees have edible and nutritious leaves - as silkworms can attest.
However these leaves have a rather high proportion of fibre, which gets stuck between your teeth, and is rapidly satiating.
This effects limit consumption - and can easily result in not consuming enough mulberry leaves - if you are not careful.
One approach to this issue is mulberry leaf juice.

So how bout some info on propagating the trees! Does it root well from cuttings?

There is a mulberry tree growing hear the corner of my currently vacant lot. It is pretty spindly due to lots of competition from other vegetation and I think another tree falling on it some years back. It is of the dark purple berry variety. Anyway, I'd been planning on cultivating it mainly for the berries since I have fond memories of them from childhood. Now I'm thinking I would also like to take some cuttings and grow more since it sounds like it has more uses than just berries.

How fast does it grow?
Would it make a good hedge?
I haven't noticed if it stays evergreen here or if it looses it's leaves during winter.

I gave some cuttings to a friend and they all took.
Now they bear fruit a couple years later...
I thought that was pretty good