By Joshua Mukute
Mulberry plant is resistant to most harsh conditions, like drought-like temperatures as long as the trees find deep, loose and nutrient-rich soils. Deep soils enable the trees to have deep-rooting; the mulberry trees too, heave to be planted in a well sunny-windy sheltered area for better performance of the leaves, as exposure to high temperature conditions leads to destruction by drying.
The lifespan of mulberry is between 25 to 50 years, depending on the care and soils, deep rooting and attention given to the plant and garden, generally, in terms of pruning, weeding and leaf picking, plus spraying that is done in a bid to control pests and diseases.
Figure 1.An Image of a well weeded Mulberry plants
Figure 2.An Image of mulberry plants in weeds
The two images above show a juxtaposition between the mulberry plants that were planted on the same days but one side is seen grown faster and healthy compared to the other side where you can vividly view how unhealthy they are in weeds.
This shows that mulberry has to be cared of for its growth and being healthy by weeding and pruning where necessary, healthy mulberry will contain all the food nutrients that the silkworms need to its growth also, resulting to good cocoons as the target, so failure to do that, a lot will be put to waste.
A well catered Mulberry gives great yields of cocoons hence giving a great return in the markets and end products
As TRIDI, our resilient and devoted staff keeps a good track record of weed management and control in most of our stations and this has enabled the entity to have great results of cocoons hence good silk grades.
Figure 3.Silkworms Spinning into cocoons at Lusanja Sericulture Station
This is what TRIDI as an entity envisions and they have already hit a target as recently Uganda’s silk yarn was cleared for commercial production after passing grade testing in Europe.
Compiled By Joshua Mukute, Public Relations Officer, TRIDI
Edited By Christine Awor
