The app beat me to it Another vote for white mulberry. Top side of the leaves are shiny as opposed to our native red mulberry which has dull leaves. Leaves come in several shapes from footballs to puzzle pieces.
Bigger version of the mulberry leaves on the small one growing at the edge of our yard. Mulberry final answer.
From the mulberry in my back yard. I saw a couple where i was working yesterday and they had the "football" leaves, but were definitely mulberries.
Its actually related to Hedge too ... But one of the old timers on this site from Iowa turned me onto it... He called it the poor mans apple tree.... It gives a pleasant light smoke.... I really like it for Smoking Cheese in the winter time...
Well, you folks are spot on as usual, it is definitely Mulberry. This is my first run in with white mulberry though.I have never seen or at least don’t remember seeing any leaves like these on Mulberry before. I was cleaning another fence row & doing some trimming when I saw the leaves. I was convinced I had hacked up an Oak but didn’t recall seeing any chips that weren’t yellow.
I’ll bet a migrating bird brought in the seeds for that tree when he landed on a fence post and did his business. Relatively common weed tree in these parts. The one growing in my neighbor’s yard that was hacked down this spring regrew to a height of 5-6 feet and we’re not done with the growing season yet. Once that root system gets established it’s off to the races.
In your observations Eric, do mulberries send out leader (not sure if thats the correct term) roots and grow more trees like black locust and beech do?
No, thankfully they don’t sucker like BL. What I’ve seen though is you can flush cut a stump at ground level, and it’ll send up as many as a dozen or more sprouts from the base and turn into an unruly mulberry bush. Best off killing the stump with chemicals or if you like working hard, dig up the entire root system.
