thats why i havent seen this as i add composted manure / wood chips every spring.
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Sounds like our soil is very similar!
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Huh, I didn’t get goumi because everything I read said only hardy to zone6! Makes me want to try it.
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yep. i have red gem goumi and another named cultivar.both berries are a 1/2in long. i misread the planting zones and had already planted them. place i got them said z5. well i haven’t had any dieoffs at snowline yet. they are protected some by my big norway spruces to the NW ,but my autumn olive thats supposed to be hardy to z3 is right next to them and the 1st 2 years was killed to snow line. i don’t give the goumis
any protection and they produced a great crop last summer! it hit -35f a few times last winter too. theyre in 4th leaf and about 6ft now.
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Thank you. I’ll see if I can dig the suckers up and incorporate some compost/humus.
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Chadspur
That yellowing looks like iron chlorosis
.I also noticed that it is next to a building.
Often limestone gravel is used as back fill next to foundations.
Often resulting in a high ph. Causing iron to be unavailable to the plants.
Short term fix foliar feed with a iron chelate .
Long term acidify soil with sulfur or other.
This is assuming a high ph
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I think AO naturally wants to be a floppy, willowy kind of bush. Kind of like forsythia. However I’m trying to make mine more upright and controlled in a highly visible location in the front of my yard. This is a Garnet from Edible Landscaping which came as a 3 gal pail. I thought it would be cool to make a section of double helix trunk on the bottom, then let it do what it wants up top. This will be it’s fourth season at my place and it is looking good. Lots of flowers this year for the first time!
The other week the plant velcro I have fixing the two trunks to the trellis failed. It totally flopped down into a mess, though the branches didn’t break thankfully. Hopefully as it gets older and the two main trunks get thicker and stiffer it can eventually hold itself up and I can remove the trellis. Maybe someday I would try to graft in some little cross pieces between the two trunks to make it look like DNA.
You might think this is a lot of effort to expend for a bush that doesn’t want to have a clean form and makes berries most people don’t care for. But I’ve got a small yard, so the extra gardening enthusiasm has to find somewhere to go, and it seems to be taking the form of overtraining bushes and trees!
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OK, that is definitely the coolest thing I’ll see today. I love it. It does look like a willow. But edible, which is always better, imho. 
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My autumn olive blooms nicely but doesn’t set any fruit. I get lots of blackberry, blueberry, honeyberry, black raspberry, and grapes nearby. I’m not sure what the deal is. Its purported to be self-fruitful, maybe not.
I got a second, small one next to it, which I believe has bloomed before the rabbits nearly did it in.
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I am from central lower Michigan, and here, we have a severe infestation of Russian Olive. It is so invasive,that it takes over open stretches of pasture and fields.
please be aware of what type of Olive you plant. We havent found a way of eradicating this scourge in twenty years.
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I have a couple here and 2 of them are blooming incredibly heavily. I really can’t smell the supposed incredible fragrance, which is likely because there are 2 stands of lilacs blooming their heads off right now as well.
I have never had much fruit from these, definitely not like the pictures I’ve seen online where the plants are heavily cloaked in red berries. My goumi is right next to the AO and I might need to prune the AO back a bit because the goumi tends to be more productive and a better fruit producing shrub for me.
My yellow fruiting variety has flowers this year too… Can’t wait to see what these are like…
Scott
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Crop is going to be big again this year!
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Invasive? YES - UNBELIEVABLY INVASIVE. I rip out Autumn Olive from my property when I find it. I made a stake to hold some poultry fence down, whittled from a branch, pointed, notched and pounded into the ground. The damn thing started growing!
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I checked all the seedlings and cultivars I have of autumn olive and all had topkill and some even died, not sure what is wrong with my farm, but at least the goumi doesn’t have that problem so far.
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We have a rather large bush (tree?) in the back yard. It was cut down to a stump by my wife’s cousin three years ago (didn’t know what it was then), but it has come back like gangbusters. Today it’s at least 7ft tall, and maybe 4ft wide. It fruited last year, but by the time they were ripening, the birds stripped it.
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It needs a pollinator.
It is behaving as such, but the nursery said it should be self-fruitful, and that seems to be what I find in Google searches as well.
Maybe some varieties are, I don’t know. I had one huge plant I dug up and gave to my brother last summer, he gave it back because it never fruited for him. He only had the one, and I had several and it had fruited the year before I gave it to him. So that’s proof enough for me right there.
They also say Goumi is self fruitful, mine arrived with fruit on it but it hasn’t made any fruit in three years on my property, but I only have one plant. Actually it did make one berry this year, so sure maybe it’s self fruitful because it made one tiny berry, but it needs a pollinator to actually do anything. I bought more since then.
If you need another autumn olive, Amber is my favorite and has the largest fruit.
My older autumn olive had fruit on it when I bought it. The younger is a yellow variety, hasn’t flowered yet, the rabbits have done a number on it. I don’t recall the variety.
What you describe makes sense. Perhaps some varieties are self fertile. The nursery from which I got mine had more than one variety, so it was probably cross pollinated when I bought it.
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