Chaing Mai #60 Mulberry – Commercial Thai Mulberry – Cuttings/Budwood

Chaing Mai #60 is a mulberry variety from Thailand that is grown in that country as a niche commercial berry crop. What distinguishes this variety from all others we have tasted is that the berries are very firm and are not damaged during harvest. Other mulberries easily have their walls broken during picking, which is why children famously turn purple from handling the fruit. This variety can be picked and placed into clamshells to be sold or stored to be eaten later. We experimented by picking fruit and storing in the refrigerator to test shelf life. At two weeks, one hundred percent of the berries were still of good eating quality. Other mulberry varieties are hardly intact by the time they get indoors. This mulberry variety has other good horticultural traits. It grows as a dense bush rather than a tree, facilitating easy harvest. It has tightly packed internodes and excessively high production, making fruit loads so heavy that the branches can lean over with fruit weight and almost touch the ground. The fruit are quite large. Unfortunately, you can’t always have your cake and eat it too. The fruit is somewhat bland compared to other mulberry varieties. It is still a good fruit that receives positive feedback when given to guests, but definitely falls short in flavor compared to some others. We feel that the shelf life of the berries and high productivity make this a worthwhile variety to cultivate even though there are better tasting varieties. In many ways, this mimics the scenario of other commercial fruits which may not have sensational flavor but can hold up to shipping. We personally enjoy eating the fruit quite a lot. This variety is similar to other types in the nursery trade such as Thai Dwarf and World’s Best. It very well may be the same clone as one of these but we have no way to confirm it is or is not the exact same variety. This variety of mulberry tends to break dormancy very early in the spring, which could make it prone to crops being lost in locations that get frequent late frosts. This variety roots very easily from cuttings if you wish to make more trees later. This listing is for 5 cuttings which can be rooted as is, or grafted on to established trees.