Choosing a mulberry pruning method

Mulberries are a permaculture favorite, and there are lots of theories zipping around the internet about how best to integrate them into a homestead.  When it comes right down to it, all of the methods revolve around pruning --- do you prune the tree at all, and if so how?

Mark's the one who brought this issue to my attention, because he's been watching our two year old Illinois everbearing mulberry grow like a weed in the chicken pasture all summer.  "Do you think we'd end up with more fruits for the chickens if we pruned our mulberry small and mashed a lot of trees together, like in a high density apple orchard?" he asked.

I'm glad Mark raised the question, because I'd been assuming we'd just let the mulberry grow to tree size and do its thing.  Various websites explain that it's not really essential to prune a mulberry tree, and I know of several big, unmanaged trees that I stole fruits from as a kid --- they seemed to bear heavily.

Despite not needing to prune a mulberry tree, there are various reasons you might want to.  In permaculture circles, lots of folks coppice mulberry trees, using the wood and leaves as a source of organic matter (and as fodder for herbivorous livestock).  A fascinating report by the FAO suggests that you get the most leaf production if you cram mulberries close together and cut them often --- optimal spacing seemed to be 2 feet apart, with cuttings every 112 days.  This study was carried out in a tropical setting, so you probably wouldn't see the 8.5 tons of dry matter per acre here in the U.S., but mulberries still might beat the average 3 to 5 tons you'd get from a grass and clover hayfield.

Of course, as I've mentioned previously, chickens aren't really leaf-eaters.  Another study (included in the FAO report) found that you can replace up to 9% of your chicken's daily ration with dried mulberry leaves without lowering egg production, but I read the same thing about duckweed, which our spoiled flock was supremely uninterested in.  Instead, I want to focus on fruit production since I know our chickens will scarf down lots of berries.

Mulberries produce fruits on last year's wood, so straight coppicing is out if you want fruit production.  On the other hand, if you remove only half the branches each year, your mulberry bush can produce fruits on the old wood while growing new branches for next year's crop.

For even more efficiency, I'm considering pollarding, which is just like coppicing, but keeps a trunk and three to five branch stubs instead of cutting the tree to the ground each year.  Annual pruning involves removing the twigs on half of the the pollard stubs, while leaving the other half to bear fruit.  This way, I won't have to worry about chickens damaging the tender young growth that would come up from a traditional coppice each spring.

What will I do with all the wood I cut out?  I plan to try rooting hardwood cuttings next year, which will let me fill the chicken pastures with little mulberry bushes.  Or so I hope!  Stay tuned for more posts on my pollarding and propagation experiments.

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