I can grow all of these. Do people really eat them on a daily basis as something foundational in their diet? I know I just need to get over myself, but…they definitely aren’t tomatoes.
I have mulberry and i wouldn’t eat the leaves on a daily basis unless it’s was hard times. It’s not terrible. I imagine sauteed with some salt and vinegar would be pretty good. I also have Jerusalem artichoke i never eat, but better to have it and not need it than vice versa.
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Once my trees are more established, I’ll be eating mulberry leaves on a daily basis. Eric Toensmeir says culinary quality varies widely, so I’m fortunate that a tree planted by a former owner has truly delicious leaves when cooked, with smooth texture. I’ve propagated and planted 5 more, plus 5 of a variety which has tasty but smaller leaves.
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Oooh. Are the fruits from that tree tasty, too?
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Yeah, great dual-purpose variety! Unfortunately, I don’t have a name for it. Toesmeier urges people to just go out and taste-test whatever cultivars and wild trees they can access, to start selecting good leaf varieties.
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Be careful, the better the berries, the better the robins pre season them for you.
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Sounds awesome! Are you planning to save any seeds and share them around? 
I’ve definitely found it to be true that there is a lot of variation in leaf quality with mulberries, mostly textural. I have one male tree that has leaves like sandpaper and it doesn’t improve much with cooking but I have several others I can eat raw when the leaves are young. The less palatable leaves are still good for tea, juicing and animal fodder.
I wonder if anyone knows if there is an upper limit on how much mulberry leaf cab be safely consumed. It doesn’t seem oxalates are an issue and I’ve seen it touted as a functional food with health benefits. But I still wonder (especially with juicing) if there’s any issue with daily consumption.
I also have a paper mulberry tree which I’ve seen lesser info on edibility and haven’t tried yet. Those leaves seem of more rough quality.
It’s supposed to be very high in protein. It grows so fast after coppocing that you could possibly saute or juice new stem growth before it lignifies, eh?
Hmmm. And if you coppiced it, you could probably use the new growth every year for projects like basketry, too.
We accidentally coppiced several Siberian elms next to our house (we were hoping to kill them . . .), and I discovered those long, straight stems work quite well to make baskets. And the leaves are edible, though they just taste okay, nothing great. The green samarras (unripe seed pods) taste delicious; sadly, they are always covered in elm seed bugs, which taste terrible, and the seed pods don’t appear low to the ground on the coppiced trees, only high above our heads on the enormous trees that are more than sixty feet high.
So, that demonstrates a potential challenge with using Siberian elm as a coppiced tree to get fruit. How about mulberries, though? Can you coppice them every year and get lots of fruit that is convenient to harvest near the ground?
If so, that may make them very interesting.
Mulberry leaves with a nice, soft texture sound lovely. Now I’m thinking maybe I should check out the wild and landscape mulberry trees in my area and see if any of them have particularly tasty leaves. 
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I don’t think you’ll get fruit for at least 2 or 3 years after coppocing but I’ve not knowingly chopped down a female (berries). I cut a male flush to the ground last summer and it put on 5feet of growth on at least 5 new sprouts, so you could eat the leaves and then take the regrowth for baskets, trellises or whatever on males, but I’m gonna try grafting some females to it this year
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I really like the idea that male mulberries can still be useful for food production, so focusing on the leaves tasting good seems like a great idea. Sometimes dioecious species can be frustrating to work with because half of the seedlings won’t make you food. With edible leaves, that works out okay!
Which, come to think of it, reminds me of another edible-leaf tree species: figs. Male figs (a.k.a. caprifigs) won’t make tasty fruit, so it may seem like they’re totally useless if you don’t have fig wasps in your climate and don’t want to use a syringe to do hand-pollination in order to breed them . . . but fig leaves are really quite tasty. So even if you plant a bunch of seeds and get more caprifigs than you were hoping for, they could still have potential for food!
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I wasn’t planning on it, but I’d be willing to try separating some seeds if there’s interest. Two drawbacks: my cultivar is tropically adapted, so may not as useful for breeding as the more locally adapted wild mulberries over most of the temperate world. And second, I don’t know whether the seeds are actually viable. Birds certainly eat the fruit, but I’ve never seen volunteer mulberry seedlings. Maybe they just don’t germinate well in our conditions, or maybe our cultivar is sterile. I’ve only seen self-fertile lone trees planted on various properties around here, never fruitless males. So perhaps they’re setting fruit without viable seed. Just a conjecture.
Thanks Jellajam for the point about less palatable leaves being useful for tea, juicing, and animal fodder.
I suspect that here in Hawai’i, we’ll be able to coppice annually and still get fruit. And since male flowers require much less plant investment than does fruit, it’s even more likely that one could annually coppice a male for leaves, and still get enough flowers for pollination. Another option is rotating coppicing on multiple trees, or on a single tree with multiple main trunks or branches, one cut each year.
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I’ve read that cold stratification can increase the germination rate of mulberry seeds, so it’s plausible the seeds are viable, just less willing to sprout in zone 11. I bet there would be interest in trying the seeds – and if it’s too much bother to separate them from the fruits, you could always just sun-dry a few dozen fruits and put them into a bag to share.
I was about to ask if you were planning to join the Serendipity Seed Swap, but then it occurred to me to check if Hawaii has any import regulations about receiving seeds from the mainland US – and it looks like it does! Very understandable, I have to admit.
@AdelePoe As for Trees with Edible Leaves, there are a LOT! about ~3-4 Days ago, I ate a bunch of Tilia cordata Leaves in the understory, very delicious salad greens that are slightly mucilaginous.
I’m also looking forward toward Sassafrass, these are my favorite leaves, one tree taste a lot like Fruity Loops, I’m hoping it makes seeds!
To give you a useable List, here are fantastic Trees with Edible Leaves
- Liden/Basswood (Tilia spp.) : Any species in the Tilia genus has edible leaves, mild salad green flavor with Mucilaginous texture.
- Sassafrass (Sassafrass albidum) : Sping Tips taste fruity like Sassafrass, best part! Mature leaves also edible but typically grinded as a soup thickener.
- American Mulberry (Morus rubra) : According to Forager Sam Thayer, these are some of the Best Greens Available amongst trees.
- Moringa (Moringa oleifera) : Fantastic Amazing Slightly Spicy Greens, think of it as a Mustard Tree that needs some cold hardiness bred into it.
- Spruce (Picea spp.) : All Spruce Species have Edible Spring Leaf Tips (Mature Needles used for teas). Nice Resinous/piney & tangy Flavor depending on which species you use.
- Fir (Abies spp.) : All Fir Species have Edible Spring Leaf Tips (Mature Needles used for teas). Nice Resinous/piney & tangy Flavor depending on which species you use.
- Grape (Vitis spp.) : Techically a woody vine but Grape Leaves & Tendrils are edible raw or cooked. Personally they aren’t my thing, too sour but People Wrap food in Grape Leaves (I Prefer Cabbage Leaves be used, but that’s just me).
- Elm (Ulmus spp.) : All Elms have edible leaves, but some species taste better than others. However the immature fruits/seeds actually make the Better Salad Green in most species.
- Bladdernut (Staphylea spp.) : Many species have edible leaves/shoots & taste great but I need to do more research. Feel free to continue where I left off.
- Aralia/Spikenard (Aralia spp.) : Many species have edible leaves/shoots but I need to do more research. Feel free to continue where I left off.
Which Mulberry Species are you eating leaves for?
I get this feeling that only Morus rubra is the species that are good for leaves while Morus alba leaves are more medicinal than edible.
Actually the Male Flowers of Mulberries are also edible, typically harvested before they burst open. That being said, you can also just graft a female branch onto a Male Tree to solve the “Dioecious” problem.
Plus Mulberries are known to sometimes switch gender (Full Tree Switch or just some parts).
I’m sure Grafting different genders will influence this effect more!
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White mulberry pops up everywhere here, it’s considered invasive, native red mulberry is considered “endangered”(?) I’ve never seen red mulberry. I suspect what’s considered white mulberry here is in reality red/white hybrid. Either way I’m not treating it like an invasive.
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I agree, a lot of Interspecies hybridization occurs in the wild. I really wonder if the hybrids between Morus rubra x Morus alba still have very delicious tasting leaves? At that point hybridization with selection for edible leaves would make the worry about crossing irrelevant.
That being said, Red Mulberry is often mis-Identified for Tilia americana another species very delicious edible leaves too. Also Often are pure Morus alba mis-identifed for pure Morus rubra, throw in hybrids & ID gets very complex. Mis-Id is so common that Morus rubra starts looking like an endangered species rather than actually being one (Altho other sources say hybridization is “Killing” Morus rubra but they don’t realize that Morus Evolution is happening right in front of them 
).
If you need ID info between Red & White Mulberry species, I gotchu.
Same here! I treat it as Delicious Evolution! Altho I never encountered a Morus rubra.
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Just to make things more complicated… in the southwest there is another native mulberry. Texas Mulberry (Morus microphylla).
It overlaps the range of Red Mulberry as far as Oklahoma.
I’m pretty sure trees are Morus rubra but I remember also reading something about the ‘native mulberries’ being often mislabeled by nurseries. A few of my trees are descended from a nursery purchased tree and the others were here when I got the property so I don’t know their history.
Some other edible leafed trees I can think of are Toona Sinensis and Rose of Sharon (although more of a bush)
Also pine catkins which make lovely caper type pickles. I have loblolly pines and use those but I think many pines could be eaten that way.
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The needles of some pines have been used for making medicinal teas.
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