I’ve never really seriously considered growing goumi, partly because I associate it with autumn olive, which is both unpalatable and a noxious weed in my area. I’m aware of how stupid that is—it’s like being one of those people afraid to eat tomatoes because some nightshades are poisonous. But, at the same time I see it and think “inferior cherry substitute in a weed costume.”
I like the fact that it’s a relatively small plant and that it’s nitrogen fixing, but as an edible is it really remarkable? Part of what makes me curious about goumi is that I’ve noticed a lot of people in warm climates choose to grow it, so that’s obviously not out of desperation for a hardy plant.
Should I give goumi a chance? If so, are seedlings high enough quality, or only certain cultivars?
I have been curious about goumi just for how cool the berries look! Never got to taste it, heck, never seen it in real life! It does sound like it would be pretty nice though.
Autumn Olive does not appear invasive in my area, but I do keep an eye on it and maximize my own harvest. The birds do not seem to have discovered the fruits yet, but the bees love the flowers. I know it spreads in other areas.If you, personally, find AO unpalatable and cannot chalk it up to trying them too soon – they are red a long time before they are truly ripe – you may not like goumi either. I find them easier to identify as properly ripe, and the astringency is primarily in the skin if you don’t, so you can avoid eating that part better in bigger fruits. So far, the birds have ignored them too for me, but they were young plants and not fully loaded last year.
They remind me of fruit punch when they are full ripe.
Goumi tastes identical to autumn olive in my area but just slightly less tannic to where I don’t mind eating it raw. One thing to note is goumis are ripe mid summer but autumn olives, like the name suggests, aren’t ripe until mid fall. So if you cook them down into jam/jelly/syrup then you have two opportunities for making that.
Similar to how there are summer and fall raspberries where the harvest times are in different seasons.
My goumies red gem and sweet scarlet were planted with dual purpose… interesting no spray fruit and nitrogen fixer…
I plantes 3 apple trees in a long bed and 2 goumies…
Apple - goumi - Apple - goumi - Apple like.
Unfortunately… my 3 Apples died of fire blight in year 4… perhaps the goumies supplied them with too much N… causing faster growth… which is known to make FB worse.
I still have the 2 goumi in that bed… they were started in 2020 and both are 8 tall x 6 ft wide with pruning.
A couple years ago I added grafts of carmine goumi to then. Those grafts produced gobs of nice large fruit last year. My favorite so far simply because they are 2-3x as large as RG or SS.
They all 3 taste very similar to me. A nice sweet tart fruity flavor.
I am adding a few grafts of raintree select to my bushes this spring. It is another larger berry.
I dont think goumi will be anyones favorite berry fruit… they are not at the level of blackberries, mulberries, blueberries, raspberries… but they are good enough and they ripen early.
When goumi are ripe here… i generally only have two things ripening strawberries and then goumi… other berries ripen later.
One other good thing about goumies… the birds love them and eat all they want… and we do too. There are so many berries we and the birds get to harvest all we want.
I have to bag/protect my blueberries or the birds get the large majority of them and we get few.
Not a problem with goumi.
So many berries that us and the birds cant even eat them all.
I will agree with all the postings, it’s definitely worth growing. It will be no one favorite fruit, but it’s so carefree, good looking and edible enough to grow. I have a lot that requires some maintenance so I’m happy to have some that I can neglect
This is it’s first spring after I planted it last year so hopefully it flowers, but it’s such a pretty plant. When I first saw it, it looked so pretty that it almost looked like a fake plant. I planted Tillamook.
No one has mentioned the heavenly smell that goumi flowers have in the evenings.
I personally prefer Sweet Scarlet to Carmine for flavor even though the fruit is about half the size. Once they are fully ripe and have lost a lot of their astringency, the squirrels usually clean out both of my bushes within a day or two. But I’m glad to grow them, mostly since they’re my earliest fruiting bush/tree. It’s hard to work up much enthusiasm for autumn olive (which tastes similar but is tiny in comparison to goumi) when it ripens around the same time as so many other superior fruits in the fall.
I think you got lots of great responses already, so I’d just add two points. First, in addition to what others said, my favorite way to use goumis is to freeze them and then eat during winter as a no-guilt snack. I find them extremely tasty this way, especially when they are almost but not entirely thawed. But even if you miss that sweet spot, they keep their shape great, the pit separates easily, and there is hardly any astringency. Last summer we froze ~30lb, and they were all gone by mid-winter, I wished we had more! Second, as others mentioned, autumn olives do taste very similar to goumis. To me, however, different autumn olives taste very differently. We grow two bushes of “Garnet” autumn olive we got from One Green World, and we don’t like them as they are too astringent to our taste. But some of the wild ones we found in a nearby park are delicious (again, not all – depends on a bush)! As an aside, our Garnet AO produced virtually no fruit (under 10 berries across both bushes) despite blooming profusely until I grafted that wild AO from the park that I liked. So last Spring was the first year when my graft produced a few flowers, and the first year when we had at least some berries. I would bet these are diploid, although they were specified as self-fertile.
You’ve all listed a lot of traits I like: Complexity of flavour (tannic & sour), fragrant blooms, early ripening, thrives on neglect. I’ve been wanting to expand the fruit season more—most of what I harvest comes in August and September—so early fruit sounds especially appealing.
It looks like tillamook isn’t available in Canada, but I might be able to get sweet scarlet next year. For now, I just ordered some seeds of Moniz.
I think I’ll also make an effort to collect some fruit from some of the wild autumn olives around here this year. I don’t think I’ve given them enough of a chance.
Tillamook also goes by the name Carmine just as an fyi in case you see it somewhere by that name. “Raintree select” is also supposed to be a large one as well, not sure if raintree ships to Canada
Shipping across the border is usually both prohibitively expensive, and risky due to phytosanitary certificates and customs delays, which is too bad cause it means there are a lot of great varieties we can’t get here. Same thing with plants from Europe. They’ve got some dwarf walnuts I’d love to grow, but there’s no way to get them here! The one that really makes me sad is prunus mume—I’ve never seen it available in Canada and it’s illegal to import prunus here at all
Elaeagnus seems to be extremely happy even with neglect in a large portion of my yard that has awful sand as it’s “soil”. It’s hard to skip something that wants to grow there.
I have limited experience. I grow only Carmine, which gave me its first substantial crop last season. My takeaways: (1) the flavor is delicious; (2) the seeds are a PIA; (3) birds will steal all the crop if you let them. Given the troublesome seeds, I ended up making almost my entire crop into jam; it was the best jam I’ve ever tasted.
Given this experience, my next step would be to experiment with a variety that has bigger fruit (i.e., more flesh per seed).
FYI, I grow the goumi inside a fence that has deterred mammalian pests (e.g., squirrels) and underneath nets that block birds. I don’t think it’d work otherwise.
