The weeping mulberry in the rear courtyard is kept trimmed to the height of the rear fence, as this is the direction that the prevailing winds come. The house is designed to catch the breeze through the kitchen window. If it wasn’t, then the tree would be much, much taller and wider.
There is a Gedye compost bin at the very base of the tree…hidden most of the year by the leaves. The chooks eat most kitchen scraps, but citrus, onion skins and eggshells go into this bin. Rather than composting, it is more a large cockroach and worm farm, full of creatures that wriggle and crawl en masse every time the lid is lifted.
I take out a top layer or two of worm castings every so often when I pot up something new, but generally the system works really well to make all our scraps disappear. The tree seems to like the arrangement too.
In summer, the tree is full of mulberries, generally on the inside branches, which create quite a cavern. I usually forget that it is near fruiting season, then spot maybe a small berry on the outside, before going under and discovering a huge harvest.
When making mulberry icecream, it is important to de-stem absolutely every berry. I learned the not-so pleasant way, when we had a batch with green crunchy bits that simply should not have been there.