Almost everyone is familiar with mulberry. But only a few know one more, little common, its name is a mulberry tree. Places of its growth are Ukraine, the Caucasus, Asia, and Crimea.
The history of mulberry cultivation goes back to Ancient China, in which silkworm caterpillars were fed with leaves of a tree . The secret of silk production has been successfully kept for more than three millennia. For only one suspicion of its disclosure in China, heads were chopped. Russia, meanwhile, was content with raw silk and ready-made fabrics.
In 555, the silkworm was secretly taken to Europe, which allowed its own production of expensive material to begin. The silk-weaving manufactory, built in Moscow (the reign of Ivan IV), served only the imperial needs.
During the reign of Peter the Great, another 43 factories were opened, producing silk, not inferior in quality to Chinese. The mulberry tree was under the protection of the king himself: the one who cut it said goodbye to his head. In addition, new mulberry plantations were laid (in the Kiev Botanical Garden, for example, trees still planted under Peter the Great still grow ).
It is worth noting that the mulberry tree is also valued for very tasty (and most importantly - healthy) fruits. Residents of the East use berries, bark, leaves, and even roots to treat kidneys, diabetes, heart disease. Mulberry with skillful use is able to purify the blood, normalizing metabolism. In obesity, folk healers prescribe infusions from the fruits of a miracle tree called mulberry.
The beneficial properties of mulberry are on a very long list. Its leaves reduce fever with a cold, a decoction of the bark is recommended for hypertension, asthma, bronchitis, cough. If you collect all the known recipes of traditional medicine, you get a rather voluminous book.
In Nagorno-Karabakh, the mulberry berry is called nothing more than “king berry” (“shah tute”). Here, not only cough and hypertension are treated with her juice, but also stomatitis, tonsillitis. Mulberry berry is consumed raw, dried, dried, canned. It contains a lot of glucose, organic acids, vitamins, fats, proteins.
Mulberry tree is an excellent building and finishing material that can only be compared in strength to oak.
There are a lot of tree varieties: weeping mulberry (up to five meters high, long branches hanging), pyramidal mulberry (up to six meters, pyramidal crown) and spherical (up to two meters, the crown looks like a ball). In total, about 400 varieties are known. Decorative forms are usually represented by white mulberry, the rest - black (red).
The tree is resistant to pollution, heat, frost. Dioecious plant, wind-pollinated, fast-growing. Polygamy is a rather rare phenomenon for him. The maximum height of the mulberry tree is 15 m.
Despite the low demands on growing conditions, a good agricultural background is still desirable: with regular feeding and good watering, the mulberry tree bears more fruit, and its fruits are larger and juicier. The plant is fed and watered until July, then the so-called peace is ensured. Lowering the temperature even during vegetation is not dangerous. Mulberries are afraid not so much of frosts as of drying out growth with the onset of early spring, when the moisture vapor is high, and the roots in frozen ground still cannot raise life-giving moisture (especially in the northern regions). Adult plants are covered
with a caked layer, which prevents drying out, but young animals do not have such natural protection yet, and therefore it dies.
Mulberry tree, despite its unpretentiousness, prefers all the same open (bright) places and loose sandy loam or loamy soils. Pouring sand to the trunk causes additional growth of additional roots. The plant quickly adapts. Fruiting once (once a year). Productivity directly depends on the variety, age and shape of the crown. Thirty-year-old plants are capable of producing up to 300 kg of aromatic fruits.
Mulberry is propagated by seeds and vegetatively.