Ruth Nakamura Ruth Nakamura · July 10, 2026
You encounter two very different pieces of advice online about pruning dwarf mulberries. One source tells you to cut back hard each year to maintain the compact size; another warns you never to prune below a certain point. The first piece of advice is fundamentally wrong for grafted patio mulberries like the Mojo, and it … Read more
Ruth Nakamura · July 4, 2026
It was an unusually dry spell that May — the kind that catches you off-guard in the Pacific Northwest — and I found myself watering my young white mulberry more frequently than usual. As I worked through the canopy one afternoon, refilling the soaker hose, I stopped cold. The leaves staring back at me seemed … Read more
Ruth Nakamura · July 4, 2026
Standard fruit-tree nursery tags won’t tell you that black mulberries stubbornly resist cuttings, or that a seedling might spend a decade producing nothing but leaves and male flowers. Garden books treat mulberries as an afterthought, if they mention them at all. The propagation advice buried in those sources assumes you’re working with something cooperative—apples, pears, … Read more
Ruth Nakamura · June 28, 2026
There’s a particular smell to a deck stain that’s been baking in the sun all summer—something between varnish and wood dust—and that’s exactly what I noticed the moment my neighbor appeared with that sheepish grin. A mulberry branch, thick as a small tree limb, lay sprawled across her fence line like an unwelcome guest. Beneath … Read more
Ruth Nakamura · June 26, 2026
Most new mulberry growers assume that your USDA Hardiness Zone is destiny—that if you’re in Zone 5, you pick from the Zone 5 mulberries, and that settles it. But I’ve learned through growing twelve different cultivars that this assumption crumbles the moment you actually compare what different mulberry species can tolerate. The real story is … Read more
Ruth Nakamura · June 25, 2026
The third week of April found me standing beneath my oldest mulberry, secateurs in hand, surrounded by the explosive flush of springtime growth that happens every year without fail. Branches were sprawling in directions I hadn’t intended, reaching past the fence line and into territory that wasn’t theirs. As I worked through the tangle, snipping … Read more
Ruth Nakamura · June 23, 2026
Don’t expect a weeping mulberry to behave like your average ornamental tree. These grafted beauties demand specific handling, or they’ll revert to upright growth and lose the cascading form that makes them worth growing in the first place. What You’re Actually Planting It pays to understand the structure underneath before you dig a hole. Weeping … Read more
Ruth Nakamura · June 21, 2026
It was the last week of June when my kitchen became a purple disaster zone. My mulberry harvest had exploded—hands stained past the wrist, a strainer overflowing with fruit every 36 hours, and my freezer already buried under spring’s jam projects and last year’s frozen berries. I found myself at 11 PM holding a bowl … Read more
Ruth Nakamura · June 19, 2026
My neighbor Sarah showed up one afternoon holding a dark mulberry she’d plucked straight from my tree, examining it with obvious uncertainty. “Before I bite into this thing,” she said, “what’s it actually going to taste like? Sweet? Tangy? Am I about to make a face?” I get asked this constantly, and it’s one of … Read more
Ruth Nakamura · June 17, 2026
I’m standing over my harvest basket with a colander in both hands, water running cold across my palms, when I catch them—those translucent specks that weren’t there when I picked the fruit an hour ago. Tiny, threadlike things moving through the wet berries. My first instinct is to dump the whole basket and never grow … Read more
