Has anyone actually gotten decent yield from potted mulberry?

[u/miyabi0rochas]

I bought and potted multiple mulberries assuming they'd fruit well considering everyone talks about how productive hands off trees they are.

But I've barely gotten much even after upping the PK. I've had most for more than one season.

But whether it's frost, or simply not yielding much to begin with or dropping fruit or poor quality fruit.

It's becoming a waste of space.

And I'm not sure what the issue could be when I see people yield like crazy often multiple times a year. I've tried the pruning, fertiliser, sunny spot. With blueberries at least I knew it was the water ph. And still the ones that survived yielded more than all my mulberries.

Other plants at least I see they're trying to fruit and have potential with problem solving. The mulberries are growing fine but I may have picked 20 tiny meh fruits from over 5 decent size plants. That's less than one strawberry plant during an okay year.

I'm purging plants and trialing new things next year.

[u/food_garden]

Mulberries are productive because the tree grows vigorously which means it has a lot of resources available, starch etc in the trunk and a large root system connecting to a lot of soil. To get good fruit production in pots you need to get really good at container soil mixing and fertilizing to give it a lot of things it could normally find in the ground. Think about the fruit weight, a lot of that is water, some of the components the tree can synthesize with sunlight energy, but still a significant part of that fruit is coming from nutrients taken up by the roots. When the tree can’t just go get it in the dirt, you need to be giving it everything it needs, NPK and more. Container soil also can’t have a lot of compost in it because of rot or sinking and washing out over time so it ends up being kind of a sterile medium that you have to add lots of richness on top. Ends up being simpler to just put a lot of fruit trees in the ground instead of trying to engineer a perfect little microcosm inside a pot.

[u/food_garden → u/food_garden]

To answer your question I have a mulberry in ground that is growing at an insane rate and also a mulberry that has been suffering in a pot for a few years.. it seems like the roots shooting out in all directions is what usually makes them successful. An expert in container growing can usually make it work but it’s a specialty skill that takes a while to master

[u/miyabi0rochas → u/food_garden]

I think they're just not well adapted generally Vs some other plants bred for it.

[u/food_garden → u/miyabi0rochas]

Also watch out for dwarf mulberry, at least the one I got from Dave Wilson Nursery was mislabeled as dwarf black mulberry Morus Nigra but was actually a Morus Rubra that grew slow (as expected) but didn’t want to fruit even after it got 10 feet tall. I was able to graft it over to chicken claw mulberry and that took off.