I tried rooting Catherine’s Find, no dice. I’m on my second attempt trying to root E. latifolia, and most of them already died off. Two sprouted survivors left, so I removed them from the propagation bottle (cut up coke bottle with soil) and placed one cut-side down in water. I placed the other one in a corner of a container my mom was using for pepper seeds, buried horizontally with only the tops of the stem sprouts sticking out. I’m really hoping at least one will root, otherwise it’s back to the drawing board.
I’ve yet to see any seedlings. That’s true for most of my fruit trees. Maybe because the wildlife cleanup.
There are a few seedling cherry trees on the property. I never see peach or plum volunteers (unless I’m mistaking some for suckers) and have only gotten apple volunteers 1 out of 15 years.
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Nice, I probably wouldn’t be able to help but try to propagate some.
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@murky … my two goumi bushes are planted 10 ft apart… but they are quite bushy and the gap between them is small now.
They have grafts of carmine and raintree select added to them.
I could not tell anyone for sure what the seedlings are variety wise… they could be RG SS C or soon RTS.
The seedlings are easy to remove from the mulch and loose soil there… no doubt I could pot up several and grow them out.
But would there be any interest on them ???
I have the Carmine air layer I plan to plant in my new orchard… and will add a few grafts of RTS to it for pollination. I definately prefer the larger berries.
TNHunter
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I would be interested to grow the seedlings out just to see what the berries would be like.
Can goumis hybridize?
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@murky @JohannsGarden @Gkight …
The carmine goumi air layer I started last July… bloomed, set and ripened fruit… which I ate this week… perfectly ripe no astringency… and it had put on 4 6 8 inches of growth.
I planted it out in the orchard this morning.
I cut the pot off of it so not to disturb the roots and… yes it had roots.
I planted it without disturbing the root ball.
Over the next couple of springs I will add grafts of raintree select and my red gem to it.
Ps… I put down a layer of compost… then 4yr composted woodchips (shown in the pic), then woodchips. It started raining just as I finished it. Nice timing.
TNHunter
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Beautiful work!
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Well done. That looks perfect! Thanks for following up.
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If you have space I think it would be cool to grow out several seedlings and see if any are better than the parents.
So far in my limited experience, the smaller the berry, the sweeter the juice when it comes to goumi. Perhaps you could get a better flavored large berry with few thorns and a relatively small seed.
I don’t know how much goumi breeding has been done but my impression is there’s still a lot of room for big improvements.
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@murky … I doubt I will be doing any experiments with goumi seedlings.
I would just rather go fishing with my extra time.
I do think that I already have perhaps a superior seedling in my Red Gem… my red gem berries are much larger than any others that I have seen here… and it seems to be the first goumi in the country to ripen fruit. It taste very good too.
My sweet scarlet is tiny… about half the size of my red gem… and ripens much later. When my sweet scarlet starts ripening… i have raspberries and a few mulberries ripening too. I dont eat a lot of the SS berries because better fruit is ripening. It taste very similar to my red gem.
On my new Carmine air layer bush in my new orchard… i will definately add several grafts of my red gem and will add some raintree select… but will not add sweet scarlet.
TNHunter
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Brambleberry permaculture farm in southern Indiana is selling seedling bushes from Carmine fruit. I bought two just to plant and see what I get out of them. I have plenty of space, so why not experiment. I think they are attractive shrubs also. They also had seedlings from Crandall clove currants so I bought four of them. They were cheap at 4 dollars and it will be interesting to see what the fruit is like.
I bought two named Sweet Scarlet from them last spring and one Carmine and a Crandall clove currant, so it will be interesting to compare the seedlings to the named varieties.
They have fruiting bushes of all the varieties named above planted all around their nursery, so who knows if the sweet scarlet and carmine crossed to create the seedlings I bought. I tasted fruit from both at the nursery and I find I like the taste of sweet scarlet a bit more and I definitely like the smaller seed. I enjoyed eating it right along with the fruit and do like the flavor of goumi. The Carmine is definitely much larger which makes for faster easier picking, but I did have to spit that big seed out. I could have eaten it but it was just a bit too much. I kind of enjoyed wandering around eating sweet scarlet and gobbling down the seeds without having to worry about spitting them out!
Sandra
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Well, maybe a seed you had to spit is growing into something even better now? 
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@Tiirsys Ha Ha. That’s a good thought. Hadn’t looked at it from that perspective. Something good may come from those big ole seeds after all.
Sandra
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Update on the sweet scarlet cuttings I rooted on bottom heat starting in January this year and then transplanted to a deep air prune box. Of the cuttings that made roots with heat (I estimate 3/4 of the total), most of them survived (maybe 75-80%) and put on a lot of growth. Good enough for me!
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Do you mean with other members of the genus? There are some hybrid elaeagnus out there, but I don’t know of any that include goumi.
The main thing is the different elaeagnus species all seem to bloom at very different times of year. To even try to make a hybrid, you’d need to store pollen.
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‘Catharine’s Find‘ is reportedly an interspecific goumi hybrid. I don’t think that’s been confirmed though.
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