Mulberry Mulberry, Bear Me a Mul...wait...

Way back in aught-7, I was mowing the grass in the side yard of my house by the back gate.  Ho-hum.  I saw this great big weed I wasn't going to be able to get with the mower, so I stopped the mower and fetched the weed-eater.  On closer inspection, though, I noticed that this giant weed - nearly two feet tall, with enormous shaggy leaves, which, it seemed, had appeared overnight - was actually starting to develop bark on it's lower stems...trunk??

April 2007

I took a bunch of pics and emailed my county extension guys, and the nice folks over at Texas A&M University, and got the same response from both:  it was an American White Mulberry Tree seedling.  Hooray!  A tree! A free tree!  LOL.  I imagine the seed was dropped there by birds. Must be another tree like this nearby.

I very carefully dug it up and transplanted it into the back yard, and then proceeded to baby the living crap out of it.  I'd already gone through two [cottonless] Cottonwood trees in the same spot.  One got ripped out of the ground in high winds, the other had some sort of weird root fungus (which I was hoping, as I planted my free Mulberry, was gone from the soil by now).

June 2007 

August 2007

Yep, you read that right:  all that progress just over a single Summer.  From everything I'd read, a Mulberry tree wouldn't outgrow this half of my yard, but I was beginning to wonder.  (We also had about a billion times more than our usual rainfall that year, so).

Spring 2008

The following Spring the trunk had filled out enough that I removed the stakes and replaced the little wire fence with a spiral of large chunks of limestone, mostly to keep one of my dogs from digging holes underneath it and disturbing the roots.

2009

Just three years in, it began producing the more familiar round-ish leaves that mature Mulberries have.  The shaggy, three-lobed leaves are immature leaves.  I also started getting wee mulberries that mostly either fell off or got eaten by birds before they were able to ripen.  Three years later and the tree is in this same stage:  unripe fruit, and a mix of immature and mature leaves.  I wonder how long this process takes?

In the Fall of 2012, I had to prune this thing for the first time ever.  It'd grown so much that it was now shading nearly half of my tiny backyard, and had some pretty serious water sprouts in places, as well as some low-hanging whip branches that were brushing the ground.  Later in the year, once the leaves dropped, off, I gave it a proper pruning to get rid of all the interior sprouts and crossing branches and things.

I wonder what'll happen this year...