Tillamook/Carmine is a big improvement in size but still a little on the small size. I would like a bigger variety but these are okay until larger ones are developed.
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Seeds are bigger too. I like sweet scarlet and eat the seeds.
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Sweet scarlet left, Red gem top, Carmine right. Fruit size comparison.
Also red gem pit vs carmne pit.
I have tried eating the pits but did not care for that. Like muscadine seeds… they are spitters in my book.
Love the pulp skins juice.
I think a potato ricer might work on carmine to separate the pits out. May try that this year to make some goumi jam.
TNHunter
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Johann has I think a blog post on his website where he ran goumi though a foodmill and if you let it sit for a few hours it separates.
Would be interesting to see if processing the liquid portion makes a different jelly/jam.
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Goumi is the most important berry crop, for own use, at our property in Denmark.
We eat some fresh during the season and freeze a lot. The frozen berries are thawed and then made into smoothie or puree that we use as topping on porridge/oatmeal at breakfast.
Smoothie : Thaw the berries and blend them at high speed in a blender until the seeds are crushed.
Strain the smoothie in a food mill with 1 mm screen. This removes the wooden fibres.
Puree : Thaw the berries and process them in a food processor at medium speed until the seeds are removed from the fruit flesh. Strain the puree in a food mill with 3 mm screen. This removes the seeds.
Freezing the berries removes any astringency and makes the final result more homogeneous.
‘Carmine’ puree has a liquid consistency whereas the puree from some other varieties is very thick.
The best puree is made from my own variety ‘Bigaard 1’ and it tastes fantastic.
‘Bigaard 1’ was selected among 60 ‘Moniz’ seedlings sown 2017. The 2024 yield of my ‘Bigaard 1’ plant was 10.5 kg (23 lbs).
‘Bigaard 2’ is another selection that is sweeter and better when eaten fresh but the puree has a more liquid consistency.
Bigaard 1 Puree
Porridge with smoothie
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A close sibling of goumi, Eleagnus pungens aka Japanese silverthorn, is even earlier. Best I can tell it’s the earliest edible berry we have (Callery pear is earlier but inedible, Chinaberry is even earlier but only edible once if you know what I mean). The bush in the woods behind my house and the bushes down the road from me bloom in late fall to early winter and ripen in March. Hard to beat something that ripens before even Japanese plums have finished blooming. They’re pretty sweet and have a mild but good flavor. Getting non-astringent, fully ripe berries is tough, and the seed is probably 75% of the whole berry.
They’re pretty invasive around here. The bush behind my house was planted by birds. I say bush, but growing in the woods like that they basically turn into vines. It’s a bizarre sight, a bush with a few random 15 ft branches growing like vines up through neighboring trees. Still, very pretty evergreen pallid foliage and absolutely heavenly fragrance when they bloom. Big, vigorous, nitrogen fixing plants, it’s a pity they aren’t native.
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So you freeze whole berries without stem but with seed, and then process when needed?
Are you sharing scion wood from the Bigaard selections?
I finally got my second E. pungens established enough to provide good cross pollination for my original which has been in ground many years. It’s holding a crop of fruit now. Still very green, but already approaching the size of the larger fruited goumi cultivars. It’s been quite a few years since I last got to eat them, but I recall enjoying them a lot and thought them quite comparable to goumi.
I’d actually love to try hybridizing E. pungens with E. multiflora because I suspect the resutling cross could produce some specimens with very extended bloom and ripening times.
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I freeze the berries with stem and seeds and process them when needed.
The stems are no problem.
I sometimes share the Bigaard selections if I can trade with something very interesting.
‘Bigaard 1’ harvest, Juli 07 2024, 10 kg. Two weeks later there was a small 0,5 kg harvest.
From my point of view it is a very good trait that 95 % of the berries can be picked at once.
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Same. I’m slow walking that particular project as I’ve other priorities, but E. pungens, E. multiflora, and E. latifolia seem like good candidates. I’m less sure E. latifolia is cross compatable, but I’d be really surprised if E. pungens and E. multiflora weren’t.
The freeze tolerance of the flowers and fruit is something quite special. The fact that Japanese silverthorn can have fruit ripen so incredibly early in the year is a real plus that goes a long way towards making the shortcomings of the fruit itself tolerable. Getting a big more size and reducing the astringency would be a huge win, especially if the progeny had a variety of bloom times and seasons. Having different Elaeagnus x cultivars ripening from very early spring through till late spring when everything else starts coming online would be quite something even if the fruit are small and seedy.
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Are all goumi varities thorny?
What sort of things interest you? I’d like to try them.
I’d like to hear others thoughts on this, but from what I’ve seen…no. Goumi seem to be like autumn olives in how varied they can be in thorniness. The size and curvature of the thorns seem to vary from one cultivar/specimen to the next as well. What I’ve noticed from my grafts thus far is that Sweet Scarlet and Red Gem are both thorny, whereas Carmine is not. I’m not saying that as a fact, just an observation from a few years of having them. I’m not sure if thorniness can vary based on environmental and growing conditions. Sweet Scarlet can certainly develop some hellishly long and pointy thorns.
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I’ll repeat what I said earlier – not the best berry, but an unbelievably good jam.
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My sweet scarlet is a small, dense bush and likes to bite.
My moniz is on some form of AO and is an open lounging thing that I suspect would prefer to climb. I see a thorn here or there, but they are easy to avoid. I have a couple others, but this is their first flowering so I haven’t really looked at thorns, but their habit looks like SS, so I won’t be able to harvest without reaching in and finding out.
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Looking at that big harvest, I have questions! Do you prune the trees for easier picking? Do you use a berry rake?
My Bigaard 1 plant one week before harvesting 10 kg berries.
No, I don’t use a berry rake. Bigaard 1 is growing very upright and that makes the berries very easy to pick. It is much faster than picking e.g. Carmine where the branches are pulled down by the heavy weight of berries. It is not necessary to prune the plant for easier picking.
Maybe you have a point though. Look at this post:
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Are you sure that’s not a cornelian cherry? Does not look like a Goumi foliage to me.
Looks great tho and loaded down.
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