Mulberry tree comparison

I love berry season, and one of the best tasting berries is the mulberry, which also happens to be one of the easiest to grow.  I currently grow three varieties of mulberry tree.  If I had space/water/time I would grow many more varieties, but for now I grow three varieties of mulberry. 

I currently grow two white mulberries (Morus alba), and one white shahtoot (Morus macroura).  I thought it was time to write a brief comparison of them. 

Mulberry variety comparison

The one on the left is a dark fruiting form of white mulberry, Morus alba.  I was told it was a black mulberry, or an 'English black mulberry', but it is not.  Even though it is not a black mulberry, it is a great little tree and has worked hard and earned a place in my garden. 

The one in the middle is another variety of white mulberry, this one is white-lavender fruited and is non-staining.  I've had this tree for a few years, it is now 15 to 20 feet tall.  I'm thinking of hacking it back in winter so the fruit is easier to reach.  

The one on the right is a white shahtoot.  White shahtoot is potentially a different species to the others,  Morus macroura, or it is a distinct long fruited form of white mulberry, or maybe it is a hybrid between M alba and one of the other Morus species.  I am not entirely certain.  This one is not as well suited to my climate as the other two, but it crops and grows each year so I haven't removed it.  

Mulberries - typical fruit from each tree

Comparing the two varieties of white mulberry M alba, is simple.  Both of these trees grow very fast, which is characteristic of white mulberries.  The leaves and growth pattern are much the same between the two types.  When not in fruit I would struggle to tell them apart.  This makes sense as they are both the same species.

The fruit of the darker one is usually a little larger than the lighter one, longer and fatter.  The darker ones taste more sour but in a good way, and they have greater depth of flavour.  Darker berries can stain things, this can be an issue when the fruit is stolen and deposited by birds. 

The lighter mulberry produce smaller berries, some are white and others have a purple blush to them.  They look vaguely similar to immali corn in their colouration.  These mulberries do not stain anything, which is nice as the birds do steal a lot of my berries.

Two mulberry varieties - the dark ones are larger

Two varieties of white mulberry (Morus alba)

I am yet to see a true black mulberry (Morus nigra) for sale in Australia.  I have seen plenty of trees labelled as nigra, yet so far none of them have been the real thing and all have been mislabeled alba.  The dark fruited one I have was listed as Morus nigra, yet it is clearly not M nigra.

M nigra is a slow growing tree and is difficult to propagate by cuttings, the buds are thick, often thicker than the branches they are borne on, and the stems of the berries are tiny and almost non-existent.  The taste of the fruit of a black mulberry is far superior to the best white mulberry.  

Dark fruited white mulberries

My dark fruited white mulberry is a really great tree.  It is very vigorous, and crops really well.  The berries are reasonably large, and are produced in large numbers.  They ripen over an extended period of time, which is common for white mulberries.  

The taste of the fruit is great if picked when fully ripe, few berries taste as good as a ripe mulberry.  If picked under-ripe the taste is good but not as great, and like all mulberries the fruit does not ripen further after being picked.  We discovered that the stem gets a little colour when they are fully ripe.  If the stem is only green, then they are not yet completely ripe.  This is good to know. 

These are not as sweet as the lighter coloured fruits, but they have a depth of flavour that is lacking in the other varietes.  I really like the taste of these darker mulberries.  I am told they make great pies, but at my house the berries are eaten so fast that few ever make it into the house.

The only issue I have with this tree is that it grows too fast, and gets top heavy.  As it rushes to reach the sky, the wood does not seem thick enough to hold the weight, and it can get broken in strong winds.  I wonder if giving it more sun, or less water, may help this.  I don't want this tree to get too tall, so I aggressively prune it after fruiting.  That seems to solve this problem. 

I am considering planting this tree in my chicken's run with some wire protecting the base.  If I do this the chickens can eat any fruit that is dropped, and there is a lot of fruit over the season!  The chickens can also eat mulberry leaves that are lower down.  Mulberry leaves have an impressive nutritional composition, and are readily eaten by my hens.  Studies show mulberry leaf can replace up to 10% of bought feed without reducing the number of eggs laid. 

Non-staining white mulberries

The lavender fruiting white mulberry is another great tree.  This one is not growing in good soil, where it is far too dry, yet it is a real survivor.  

This one is growing behind my fence out near a footpath and the road.  People walk past this, yet very few ever take any berries.  I doubt many people know what these berries are as they are light in colour, and the few who do recognise them may not realise it is ripe as it is light coloured.  This tree is far too large to net, and birds take many berries.  

This year there are more berries than ever before.  This tree is very productive.  I have no idea how many berries were stolen by birds, or how many my kids ate, but I picked many bowls full many times over this season.  

White mulberries - very sweet

These ripen white or lavender, some individual berries are much darker than others.  The taste of this is very sweet, far sweeter than the darker fruited mulberry.  My kids love the taste of these mulberries.  I really like them, but find I can't eat too many because they are too high in sugar for me.  

I eat these until I start to feel blood sugar issues building, then I try to eat less of them.  I find it hard to limit how many I eat because they are only here for a short time each year, and they are so nice, and surely one more can't hurt...  

I am not sure why some berries ripen lighter than others.  I don't think it has to do with sunlight.  Some of the mulberries are half light and half dark.  While this really doesn't matter, I still find it fascinating.

Mulberry, half dark half light

White Mulberry

The white shahtoot mulberries are not well suited to my climate.  This tree does ok here, but needs a lot of extra water, and parts of it die back each spring for unknown reasons.  The berries are very long, normally a little over 10cm long, this year they were far shorter than normal.  

Normally this tree produces a lot of berries, and this year was no exception.  Last year it got burned back badly by a late frost and didn't really fruit at all.  This year it produced more fruit than ever before.  I don't know if it has enough leaves for the amount of fruit it produced.  

While the taste of these berries is incredible, they do not taste much like regular mulberries.  When ripe they taste like honey ripened apricots, they are amazingly sweet.  I am told they dehydrate well, but have not tried this yet.  My kids love the taste of these shahtoot berries, as do I.  I find them a bit high in sugar and have to limit the amount I eat otherwise I get blood sugar problems.  Again I find it hard to limit these, because they taste so great.  

The white mulberry leaves are good vegetables, and can be used to make something that tastes surprisingly like green tea, I have not tried to eat shahtoot leaves.  They should do much the same job, but seem a little thicker so may need to be picked a little younger.  

I am tempted to get a red shahtoot, these are meant to have more mulberry flavour.  They are also meant to be less cold hardy, and I don't have much space to fit in another tree, so I may never grow one of them.  

White shahtoot mulberries

I don't think it is any surprise that I love mulberry trees.  I think they should be more widely grown.  If I had room for only one fruit tree, a mulberry would be high on the list of the few I would consider growing.  

Mulberry trees are like a vegetable garden on a trunk.  They produce ample nutritious leaves which can be cooked as vegetables or used to make tea or fed to animals, and they produce an abundance of berries which taste incredible yet are too soft to ever be found at markets.

Given how low maintenance mulberry trees are, and the amount of delicious berries they produce is nothing short of incredible, I am surprised I don't see more of them in people's gardens.  

Mulberries - I love them

I do have some extra mulberry trees I grew from cuttings.  At this stage I am not selling them (other than a few plants locally) as postage would be an issue.  Given these things can easily grow from pencil size to more than 6 feet tall in a season, perhaps I should sell small rooted cuttings over winter while they are dormant.  

If I ever do sell mulberry trees, they will be listed on my blog along with everything else I am selling that month, the details will be updated on my for sale page.  

Mulberry tree

I grow a few different mulberry trees.  For some reason, mulberry trees in Australia tend to be mislabeled more often than not.  

This mulberry tree was meant to be a black mulberry (Morus nigra) but was obvious when it arrived that it was a white mulberry Morus alba (or a hybrid of alba).  The fruit of this tree is meant to be very dark, and the taste is meant to be great, which means it should still be worth growing even though it is not a black mulberry.  

The first year the tree grew well over six feet tall.  This fast growth is a trait of white mulberries, black mulberry are usually slow growing.  I had it growing in a pot of soil, and think it would have grown larger had it been in the ground.  The little tree was strong, and went dormant over winter.

The tree broke dormancy in spring and started to grow.  It had a few berries developing at each leaf node.  Then we were hit with a very late severe frost.  The tree was burned by the frost and lost about 6 feet of growth.  My other, larger more established mulberry trees all lost over 6 feet of growth to that frost.  Needless to say, this little tree did not produce any berries that year. 

The little mulberry tree survived, and grew well, then went dormant over winter.  Now spring is here my little tree is breaking dormancy again.  It has fresh new leaves, and each leaf node looks to be producing several mulberries.

As you can see below, this tree is trying to be rather productive.  

Mulberry breaking dormancy

This tree is covered in developing fruit.  Hopefully this year I get to taste some of them.  

Interestingly, last year my larger more established mulberry trees were loaded in fruit, and were all severely burnt by the late frost.  I worried because my white shahtoot mulberry looked like it had been killed.  It was burnt back to a stump.  I'm happy to say it survived and did a lot of growing last spring/summer, and this year has more developing berries than I have ever seen before. 

White shahtoot mulberry

White shahtoot breaking dormancy

I have said before that a mulberry tree is like a vegetable garden on a trunk.  The berries are delicious, and the leaves are surprisingly nutritious.  

Obviously people can eat mulberry fruits, but not many people in Australia realise you can also eat mulberry leaves.  People can eat mulberry leaves cooked (or raw), they can be used to wrap things, and mulberry leaves make a nice 'tea'.  Basically any animal that eat leaves will eat mulberry leaves.  Mulberry leaves taste ok cooked, and are more nutritious than most common vegetables.  

The leaves from my dark fruited mulberry tree can be huge.  As mulberry tree leaves make great vegetables, producing a lot of large leaves is another great trait to have.  

Mulberry is a great leaf vegetable

At the moment I am growing this tree in a pot.  I planned to grow it in a pot for the first year or so and then put it in the garden.  I should have planted it into the soil this past winter or the one before, but I didn't, and now it will have to wait until next winter.  

You can see below that the pot also has miner's lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata) growing in it.  I didn't plant the miner's lettuce, but some seed got in somehow, and I encouraged it to grow.  This annual vegetable germinates in winter, grows until the weather gets hot, then sets seed and dies.  The miner's lettuce in the pot acts as a living mulch, weed seeds do not germinate as it is too thick.  

I like the taste of miner's lettuce, and I like how it self seeds and reappears each year for me.  Saving seed of miner's lettuce is fiddly, so I find it easier to grow some miner's lettuce in a pot, and when it seeds I move the pot to where I want this plant to grow the following year.  Inevitably some seed falls from the pot, and I have a new patch of miner's lettuce the following winter.  It's kind of the lazy way to save seed.

Sometimes miner's lettuce appears in the lawn, but doesn't grow large enough to eat as it keeps getting mown.  It still flowers and sets seed in the lawn, this seed gets washed around in rains or moved by wind, then the following winter seedlings pop up in new places.  I wish I had more of this growing, and am always sad when it succumbs to the heat and dies off for the season. 

Mulberry tree growing in a pot of soil

Miner's lettuce flowering

While I was originally disappointed that this tree was not a black mulberry (Morus nigra), and it appears to be a dark fruited white mulberry (Morus alba), it is still a good tree.  It is showing strong growth even when conditions are not great, it looks to be rather productive, and it has abundant large leaves.  Hopefully it has the classic mulberry taste as there is no point growing it if the berries don't taste great.  

Normally mulberries begin to ripen around December/January here, this year they started early November.  I'm happy to say they taste great.

Mulberries - I love them

I may try to grow some from cuttings and see how readily they root.  The fruit is very good, so if this one is easy to propagate, I may build up numbers and share around some of the plants.  If that happens I may list them on my for sale page.  

Perennial vegetables for sale October 2025

For sale in Australia perennial vegetables, heirloom vegetable seeds, edible herbs, organic berry plants, and a few non-edible plants and things.  Everything has been grown organically by me.  

Maintaining my old for sale page wasn't working for me, so each month I will write a new blog post with an updated list of what I have for sale that month and include a link on my old for sale page. 

Various organic tomatoes

For Sale: October 2025 

Bare Rooted Plants $5 each (unless otherwise stated): 

Skirret offsets 
Everlasting onions 
Babington leek 
Pineberry strawberry 
Virginian strawberry
Atilla alpine strawberry 
Jekkas thyme 
Spearmint 
100 yr old mint
Lavender mint 
Willow herb
Vietnamese fish mint
Vietnamese coriander
Variegated water parsley
Green water parsley (more vigorous stronger tasting version of the variegated form)
Asparagus (Variety: Purple) 
Asparagus (Variety: Precoce D'Argenteuil) 
Sweet Violet 
Water cress - well rooted cuttings
Hops (Variety: Target)
Brahmi/water hyssop (Bacopa monnieri) 
Tiger nut/chufas (Cyperus esculentus) $5 for 5 tubers
Jerusalem artichoke tubers $3 each
Duck potato $3 each
Chinese water chestnuts $3 
Spider plant (variegated, green, or reverse variegated)  $3 each
Azolla  ($3 per scoop)  

Ancient Cultures: 

Milk kefir grains  $5 

Heirloom Vegetable Seeds:  $4 packet (unless otherwise stated) 

Immali corn
Superior coriander
Giant parsley
Purple hot mustard
Purple asparagus
Tomato Zolotoe Serdtse
Tomato Tommy Toe
Tomato Reisetoimate 
Tomato Woolly Kate 
Senposai
Huacatay

Non edible things:

Aloe vera $5
String of pearls succulent - plant $5, cuttings $2
String of beans succulent (from Coober Pedy) - plant $5, cuttings  $2
Red jelly bean succulent  $5 
African violet leaf cutting (Variety: New Hampshire) $3 each
African violet leaf cutting (Variety: unnamed double light blue) $3 each

Candle mold 'skep' $10 each
Candle mold 'owl' $10 each 

Postage Prices: 

$12 for plants etc, or 
$3.50 if only buying seeds.  

I post the Monday after payment has cleared.

Jerusalem artichoke tubers

To order anything from the above list: 

Please send me an email saying what plants/seeds you would like and I will reply with prices/payment methods.  My email address will need to remove the the spaces, put @ instead of the word 'at' and . in place of the word 'dot': 

damien_beaumont at yahoo dot com dot au 

Photographs, binomial names, and descriptions of plants, and notes on how I grow them, can be found on my old for sale page.  Please note my old page has a lot of things not currently in season/not currently for sale.  The only things I have for sale this month are listed in this blog post above. 

Mulberry tree for food security

A mulberry tree is like a vegetable garden on a trunk.  

Mulberry trees are well known for producing delicious berries.  What many people do not realise is that mulberry trees also produce abundant and surprisingly nutritious leafy greens.  

I have cooked and eaten mulberry leaves, they taste nice and can be used like spinach or silverbeet.  I have only cooked eaten young leaves.  I imagine older leaves would be too fibrous and I can't imagine raw leaves to taste all that nice.   

Mulberry leaf as a vegetable

While there is little mention of them on the internet, mulberry leaves are eaten as a vegetable in several places such as Cuba and Latin America.    

Mulberry trees produce well with little (or no) irrigation, can thrive in many climates from frosty temperate areas to the tropics, thrive on many different soil types, they have few significant pests, and they produce well on many different soil types.  Mulberries are remarkable trees that are drastically underutilised for food security, they are excellent fodder for livestock, and are a great vegetable for people.  

The taste of cooked mulberry leaves is ok, not bitter or objectionable, but also not remarkable.  I have started to see people sharing recipes using mulberry leaves to wrap lamb or chicken or rice or tofu, similar to how people use grape leaves.  Given how nutritious and abundant they are I think mulberry leaves deserve to be eaten more commonly.

Stuffed mulberry leaves - image from https://maryamsculinarywonders.blogspot.com/2019/04/1234-freekeh-stuffed-mulberry-leaves.html 

Mulberry leaves typically contain more than triple the amount of protein found in many vegetables, and under normal circumstances mulberry trees can produce up to double the amount of protein per acre compared to soy.  

If you don't already have a mulberry tree, you should consider growing one.  Mulberry trees are one of the simplest fruit trees to grow, they grow very fast, and mulberry leaf is the easiest vegetable for beginners to grow and the most productive vegetable for beginners to grow.  

Cutting grown mulberry tree

A study was undertaken comparing the nutritional value of fresh leaves from six different genotypes of mulberry.  Even though there is a bit of a range of values between cultivars it demonstrates that mulberry leaves are far more nutritious than most vegetables we commonly eat.   

I have summarised their findings below:

• Moisture 71.13 to 76.68% 
• Protein 4.72 to 9.96% (most vegetables have about 2% or less) 
• Ash 4.26 to 5.32% (ash is the mineral content: calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, zinc, etc) 
• Neutral Detergent Fiber 8.15 to 11.32%  
• Fat 0.64 to 1.51% 
• Carbohydrates 8.01 to 13.42% 
• Energy 69 to 86 kcal/100 g 
• Vitamin C 160 to 280 mg/100 g (oranges have 50 mg)
• Beta-carotene 10,000 to 14,688 mcg/100 g (carrots have 8,729 mcg)
• Iron 4.70-10.36 mg/100 g (spinach has 2.6 mg)
• Zinc 0.22-1.12 mg/100 g 
• Calcium 380-786 mg/100 g (full fat cow milk has about 120 mg)

Recently a desktop review was conducted comparing several options for households producing all their own protein when there are future disruptions to supply chains.  Their conclusions were unrealistic at best, but they made me think about back yard food production.  

We have a good size vegetable garden, but it is nowhere near large enough to supply our household with all our protein requirements.  We also have a few egg laying chickens, and some fruit trees, including a white mulberry (Morus alba) and a white shahtoot mulberry.  

Following on from the growing protein study linked to above, and given how nutritious mulberry leaves are, I wondered how many mulberry trees I would need to produce all my protein for a year.  So, out of curiosity I crunched some numbers similar to the desktop review.  The results were interesting.  

Mulberry leaf stuffed with chicken - image from https://www.greenprophet.com/2013/05/stuffed-mulberry-leaves-recipe/

A lot of research has been conducted into mulberry tree leaves as they (mulberry leaves, not the berries) are commercially important due to silkworm farming.  I used this research to work out how much protein a mulberry tree can produce, and how many trees would be required for a year supply of protein.  

Often, about 9,600 mulberry trees are grown per hectare or almost 4,000 per acre, this works out to just under one per sqm.  Yields of fresh leaves range from 3.2–21 tons/acre/year (8–52 tons/hectare/year) with most in the 8–12 tons/acre/year (20–30 tons/hectare/year).  This means that on average, each year roughly 2.5kg of leaves are harvested per mulberry tree.  

The protein in mulberry leaves ranges from 15-35% dry weight, or 4.72-9.96% of the fresh weight.  I used 6.5% for the protein content of fresh leaves in my calculations, which is lower than the average.  That works out to 162.5 grams of protein per tree being produced from leaves alone, meaning a one year supply of protein for one person can be provided by the leaves harvested from approximately 112 mulberry trees.   

Mulberry leaves are abundant vegetables

To give this perspective, commercially potatoes yield about 4kg per sqm, providing about 80 grams of protein per sqm.  That’s about 228 sqm of growing area for potatoes per person if relying solely on potatoes to meet protein requirements.  Mulberry trees would only use about 53% of the total land that would be required to grow potatoes and produce the same amount of protein.  As I said earlier, a mulberry tree is like a vegetable garden on a trunk.  

Soy is a legume crop that is known for producing high amounts of protein per acre.  Soy is said to produce up to 513,066 grams of protein per acre.  

Around 4,000 mulberry trees are planted per acre, each yielding 2.5kg of leaves with 6.5% (or more) protein fresh weight.  This produces over 650,000 g protein per acre, which is significantly more protein per acre than soy.  

If growing a mulberry variety with 10% protein in fresh leaves it would produce double the amount of protein that soy can produce per acre.  Mulberry trees produce more protein per acre than soy.  

White mulberry tree outside my back fence 

Comparing the water requirements is a bit more difficult and far less accurate, so you have to take the following 'with a grain of salt'.  

Not surprisingly, I could not find any publications directly comparing the water requirements of mulberry and soy.  According to Agriculture Victoria (https://agriculture.vic.gov.au/crops-and-horticulture/grains-pulses-and-cereals/growing-grains-pulses-and-cereals/growing-soybean-in-victoria), soy requires an average of 2.6 Megaliters of water per acre.  According to the Rural Industries Research and Development (https://agrifutures.com.au/wp-content/uploads/publications/00-056.pdf) mulberry tree plantations require less than 1.3 Megaliters per acre.  

Using the above calculations it appears that mulberry trees could produce about double the amount of protein per acre compared to soy, while using half the irrigation.  Mulberry trees can produce good amounts of protein per acre in marginal areas where soy will not produce any crop because the climate and soils and climate are not right for soy.  

Who knew that mulberry leaves can produce that much much more protein per acre that soy!  

Mulberry cutting

Does all of this mean I am suggesting that people should grow 112 mulberry trees each to produce all their protein needs?  Absolutely not.  

Even though it would be really cool, replacing the lawn with an orchard of heavily coppiced mulberry trees isn’t something that people would want to do.  

While growing this many mulberry trees may be possible in some yards, and would take less time and effort to look after than the average lawn of the same size, I don’t think it is realistic, and I'm not planning on doing that.  

10cm tall to 6 feet tall in under 5 months

I can’t imagine what a miserable existence it would be having to eat about a kilogram of mulberry leaves each and every day to meet your protein requirements.  I don't know what you would do over winter while the deciduous trees are leafless.  

I am not suggesting you plant 2 or 3 mulberry trees, and eat nothing but mulberry leaves for a few weeks each year.  I am also not suggesting that you should grow a mulberry and regularly incorporate its leaves in your meals over the growing months. 

Mulberry leaf plantation. Image by Nahid Hossain, Creative Commons 4.0 license

What I am suggesting is growing a mulberry tree, or several mulberry trees, is a good idea if you have the space.  It will add to your food security even if you never eat the leaves.  

The estimated leaf yields above are based on coppiced trees that are regularly harvested for silkworm production.  When grown like this there are no berries, just leaves.  

Most backyard mulberry trees would not grow like this, most would be allowed to produce berries and develop into large trees with a single trunk or as a multi trunked tree.  As the trees grow larger, they produce increasing yields of both berries and leaves.  

The FAO mentions very old trees in China producing 400kg of berries and 225kg of fresh leaves in a year.  What an incredible sight they must be!  

My mulberry producing food from otherwise unused land

A mulberry tree would increase your food security.  Each year you can eat some berries (they are utterly delicious), or you can grow the tree in your chicken run and let your chickens eat them, if your chickens eat all the berries you will save a little money on chicken feed and help your chickens be a little healthier.  Or you can let the birds take care of them for you.  From time to time the leaves can be eaten, or made into tea, or just left alone to allow the tree to gain energy and grow larger.  

During times of financial hardship, you hear regular stories of vegetable gardens being raided and produce being stolen (and/or destroyed).  While people would probably take some berries, it is unlikely during an emergency that your neighbours would take any leaves from your mulberry tree as they would not recognise them as being edible or as being high in protein and vitamins.  This adds to your food security as you would have a tree full of leaves to cook if you ran low on everything else.  You could use the leaves like spinach, except mulberry leaves are far more nutritious.  

Fresh mulberry leaves can grow large

Chickens and other small animals enjoy eating mulberry leaves.  When hard times hit, you may be unable to buy food for chickens or other little animals .  You certainly don't want them to starve.  The mulberry tree can be used to reduce the amount of bought feed you are using, to get you through until you are able to buy animal feed again.  This also adds to your food security.  

Mulberry trees appear to be the ultimate perennial vegetable.  Most people who have eaten the leaves cooked enjoyed them, some felt neutral about them, so far I have never met anyone who has disliked them.  People tend not to eat mulberry leaves as a vegetable often due to the cultural taboo surrounding eating tree leaves.  For some reason we have been told to view tree leaves as a famine food rather than a sustainable and easy to grow perennial vegetable.  There is nothing wrong with eating healthy organic leaves from mulberry trees.  

Having a nice-looking shade tree in your yard, that is able to provide you with delicious berries in season, and a few handfuls of vegetable leaves if needed, seems like a sensible thing to do.  If you can get past the idea of tree leaves being famine food, all the better! 

Fragaria virginiana breeding larger berries

I grow a few different strawberries, some different species and some garden strawberries.  One of the species of wild strawberries I grow is Fragaria virginiana. 

Fragaria virginiana strawberries

F virginiana comes from North America.  This species was used as one of the two main parents to develop the garden strawberries that you can buy from the shops.  This was used as a parent due to its great taste, the other parent was used for its larger sized berries.

The taste of these berries is similar to a garden strawberry, but nicer, and more concentrated.  The original berries were too small for my liking, so I decided to do some breeding for larger berry size.  

Larger F virginiana strawberries

When I first got seeds of this plant they took a while to grow to maturity, the resultant berries were about the size of your finger nail.  The berries tasted great, but were too small.  Even the smallest berries in the photos are larger than the original berries.  I don't know what size berry is normal for this species, I know there are several cultivars overseas with larger berries.  I think the wild ones tend to be a lot smaller. 

I originally obtained seed that had been collected from the wild.  These tiny berries certainly had great taste.  They also had a lot of genetic diversity, which made this selective breeding project a lot simpler.  

I collected seed, grew out a lot of plants, culled the ones with the smaller berries, and grew seeds from the ones with the largest berries.  I did this for a few years.  

It takes time for these to go from seed to fruit, and these only flower once or twice per year in my garden, so this project took quite a while before I could see any progress.   

Saving seed from strawberries, and growing it out to maturity, is fiddly.  Luckily you get a lot of seed per berry, and a lot of genetic diversity combined with a lot of seed means there is a good chance of stumbling across the right plant.  Growing out large numbers helps your chances of getting the right genetic combination.  

Some are too small and will be culled

After a few generations it was clear that the berries are significantly larger than the original ones.  As you can see in my photos, some plants produce larger berries than others.  It takes the same space and effort to grow tiny berries as it does larger berries, so the smaller ones are culled.  

This is still the same species, it has not crossed with any other species, or messed around with ploidy levels.  I have selected for larger berries through growing many seedlings and culling hard.  Some of the smaller ones also don't look typical of this species, given they open pollinated they may have crossed, so I have also culled anything that appears to be an off type.  

I was worried that the taste might be diluted in the larger berries.  I am happy to say that this has not been the case.  The larger berries taste the same as the smaller berries.  When under ripe they are not great, but when ripe they taste incredible.  

These plants all produce runners in my garden.  This means I am able to cull the smaller ones and propagate the larger ones quickly and easily.  If they did not produce runners it would likely mean another 15 or so years of growing out seeds to produce a stable variety, so runners are great.  Runners also mean the plants spread to different parts of my garden, if we have another dry summer that kills off lots of things there is a chance one runner will be sitting somewhere protected and I will be able to us it to restart the patch.  

Realistically this is probably the largest berries that these plants can produce through selective breeding.  I think they have reached their genetic potential.  I will still try to grow seed from the largest ones and see if there are any further gains to be made, but I am not expecting much from here.  

If I were to induce polyploidy, or hybridise with another species I know the berries could become far larger, but I have no plans for attempting things like that.  

Further breeding work could be done with these to introduce day length neutrality, or more flower production.  I am not sure if my stock has the genes needed for this, and I probably can't source any Fragaria virginiana with the needed genetics, so it is unlikely I will breed towards this any time soon.  

I sell bare rooted plants of the largest ones through my for sale page.  The plants flower in spring and fruit spring/summer.  Sometimes they provide a second crop in autumn.  They produce many runners and can fill a garden bed relatively quickly.  Their productivity is low, but they make up for that in great taste and ease of growing.

Raspberries: yellow red and black

I do a bit of vegetable breeding, I also breed other plants with various different aims.  

A number of years ago I bred a new variety of red raspberry.  I acknowledge that I am biased - I like this raspberry (Rubus idaeus).  It is genetically thornless, very vigorous, incredibly productive, produces dozens of flowers per cluster, fruits multiple times per year, and tastes nicely sweet.  This red raspberry performs better in my garden than any other raspberry variety I have grown.  I am told it does not grow as well in subtropical gardens.  

I eventually tracked down a yellow raspberry (Rubus idaeus) and did a little breeding with this too.  This one has thorns (prickles).  It only crops once or twice per year and has flowers in clusters of about half a dozen.  The berries are pretty, they smell divine, and it tastes very sweet.  What it lacks of the typical raspberry flavour it makes up for in delicate floral notes.  I need to do more breeding with this to create a thornless primocane version.  

After some years I got a black raspberry (Rubus occidentalis).  This is a different species of raspberry to the red (or yellow) raspberry.  It is not a blackberry.  It is not a loganberry.  It is not a youngberry.  It is not a mulberry.  It is not any other kind of berry, this is a black raspberry.  

It drives me crazy how difficult people seem to find the concept of a black raspberry in Australia, but I digress.  

Yellow, red, and black raspberries

My black raspberries have a rich complex taste and aroma.  It is not as sweet as my other raspberries (neither are store bought raspberries), but it is not what I would consider to be sour.  They have a nice taste, it does not taste the same as a red or yellow raspberry, and it is not meant to be the same as them.  It does taste a bit like a raspberry, but also very different.  Black raspberry tastes nothing like a blackberry, and tastes nothing like a mulberry.  There really isn't anything I have eaten that they taste similar to.

I am bad at describing taste, my description above really doesn't describe it well.  The internet says black raspberries are "tangy, richly flavored, mildly sweet, cooling, and high in antioxidants".  I am not sure that description is all that much better than mine.  

Yellow raspberry, red raspberry, and black raspberry 

You will probably notice that the berries are a bit smaller than red or yellow raspberries.  My comparison photos are all typical sized berries.  Some berries from each plant are larger or smaller, but the ones in the photo give you a decent idea of what is normal.  While black raspberries are smaller, they are still a decent size.  While I would prefer them to be larger, I don't find them to be too small. 

These plants are not what I would consider to have low productivity, and they do not blow me away with the size of the crops.  They usually produce clusters of about half a dozen flowers.  This is comparable to most raspberry varieties including my yellow raspberries, but it feels like nothing compared to my red raspberry which produces dozens per cluster.  

In my garden my red raspberries have the longest picking season.  They start ripening first, finish last, and produce the most berries over the season.  My yellow raspberries start to ripen after the red raspberries have been cropping for a while.  My black raspberries start to crop once I have been picking both the red and yellow for a few weeks.  

Black raspberries grow well in my garden, but they need different management to red raspberries.  They have curved thorns, similar to a blackberry or a rose, and the thorns seems to grab at you when you walk past the plants.  This is worth noting if you want to grow one.

I grow mine in pots, they appear to do well in pots.  I have never had red or yellow raspberries perform well in pots for me.  

Black raspberries grow differently to red raspberries.  Red raspberries grow roots underground and send up canes from the tips of these roots, black raspberries do not do this.  Black raspberries will set down roots from the tips of the canes if they touch the soil.  

My black raspberries are a floricane variety, meaning that they flower and fruit on the previous season's growth.  This is good to know as it dictates the way you prune them.  

I don't prune mine at all and at this stage, but if I was pruning them I would need to ensure large canes from the previous year were intact so they could flower.  I imagine that tip pruning would encourage them to branch and be more fruitful.  I know that tip pruning my red or yellow raspberries increases the crop significantly as they produce 5 to 10 times as many flowers.

Much like my other raspberries, the black raspberries do not ripen all at once.  Each cluster will have some ripe berries and some unripe berries at the same time.  I pick them once ripe, and go back each day or so to pick more over the season.  A long picking season is great for home gardeners, but dreadful for commercial growers who have to employ pickers.  

It is simple to tell when the berries are ripe because they are black.  The berries start out green, turn red, and get darker until they ripen a black colour.  Ripe berries will pull away from the stem easily, if they resist pulling from the stem they usually aren't ripe enough.  Raspberries have a hollow core once picked, blackberries and youngberries etc do not have this hollow core.  

So far birds seem uninterested in my raspberries of any colour.  They also don't seem overly interested in my strawberries.  Perhaps I am just lucky, or perhaps the birds are too busy stealing all of my plums and apples to worry about berries.

My black raspberries seem to have more seeds than red raspberries.  Perhaps it isn't more seeds, perhaps they are larger seeds.  I am not sure, all I know is they are more noticeable.  I don't find the seeds very annoying, but they do get stuck between my teeth more often than the seeds from my red raspberries.

Black raspberries are simple to grow from seed, but it takes a long time before you get the first crop.  I am growing out some seed at the moment, and once berry season is over I plan to root some of the can tips.  

If I have a few extra plants I plan to offer them on my for sale page.  I don't have any spare plants at the moment but I am expecting to have a few to offer when they are dormant in winter or early spring.  

Raspberry comparison