Thread: Mulberry canker
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Old 27-09-2011, 03:47 PM
echinosum echinosum is offline
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First recorded activity by GardenBanter: Feb 2006
Location: Chalfont St Giles
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Originally Posted by hellomabel View Post
Hi.
My 7-year-old black mulberry has canker and is looking very sorry for itself. Only half the tree has leaves, what few berries there were dropped off early, and it is definitely sicker than it was last year when it started looking unhappy. It's in a damp climate (East Cornwall) and sits in the middle of a lawn. The tree has grown slowly (the garden was laid on top of a former school playground, so I had to dig the hole in the Victorian equivalent of hard core) but until two years ago looked healthy and produced fruit.
I have two questions:
1. Is it better to cut off the affected branches immediately (but run the risk of excessive bleeding from the stumps) or wait until winter when the tree is dormant (but give the disease more time to spread)?
2. Do I treat it with anything after the pruning? Extra feed? Mulch?
3. If it is too far gone (whenever that is) so needs to come out, would it be safe to get another black mulberry? And should I avoid using the same spot?
Any tips would be great.
My late mother had a similar problem with a black mulberry, likewise grown in the west country in the middle of a lawn - the canker got in to lawnmower damage, and the tree just never got going, and since in the end it was going backwards it got chucked out.

Bearing that in mind, ie, unless you do something drastic it is probably doomed anyway, what I would do would be to try drastic pruning to see if it would renovate. I have successfully done this with other fruit trees. I once had such bad cankering on an apple that I cut the entire crown of the tree off 8" above the graft - and the tree regenerated from that small remains. It is now a good tree, whereas previously it was going backwards. (In the mean time I planted another apple tree just in case.)

It is pretty nearly pruning time for it anyway, as soon as it is dormant in late autumn, so you may as well wait another month or two to get there, rather than risk heavy bleeding by pruning it now. Make sure you cut well back beyond the canker.

I gave my mulberry it quite a hard pruning last year, and it grew back very strongly, best crop ever. It's my policy to keep it well pruned back to ensure that i keep the tree within berry-picking height.

In the mediterranean, mulberries are used as street shade trees, and they are cut back very hard each year, in some cases to just a vertical stick with a thickening at the top, as you see for pollardded willows in Britain. Although sometimes you see one or two horizontal branches, in some cases linked to the next tree. But nevertheless, they prune them very hard indeed. So I reckon there is good potential for it to come back from a very hard prune. But likely you will get no fruit next year - I think that is one of the things they are trying to achieve when used as a street tree, hard pruning prevent it fruiting, because it makes a mess.