Does anyone here have experience requesting scion from the USDA-ARS to be sent to locations outside the United States? I’ve been thinking about sending ‘Carmine’ and ‘Pippi’ to them if they are good about fulfilling international requests.
1 Like
My sweet scarlet and red gem fruited like crazy last year. The birds and us got all we wanted and had plenty to spare.
One ripens and as it plays out… the other kicks in… extending the fresh goumi eating period nicely.
Got some Carmine cuttings via trade … and have grafted 3 onto my RG and SS.
They are all looking good so far. The carmine fruit are quite a bit larger than RG SS.
8 Likes
I tasted one by accident. I was at a nursery and saw a couple bushes, one with longer berries that were fully ripe. So I tasted it and suddenly my body felt “better” as if I had been missing a vitamin and it thanked me. I thought that was odd so I found another and ate it, and same temporary reaction. I just didn’t have room to take it home, and regretted it. One day I want the Tillamook variety to grow and eat all I want. If any other people react to it how I did, it will not be a fad.
5 Likes
Tillamook and Carmine are the same cultivar from what I understand
3 Likes
I think I read that sweet scarlet is the same as red gem. Is there anything I can read to see if Carmine is indeed the same as Tilamook? I want to get the larger more flavorful type and not be disappointed.
2 Likes
3 Likes
I have a red gem and sweet scarlet (from OGW) and one ripens a bit earlier than the other… works well… when one is about done… the other kicks in.
I got some scion of carmine this spring and grafted 3 onto my rg and ss. All took and are doing great… 2 of the 3 bloomed and have carmine fruit on now.
That is RG vs Carmine fruit.
6 Likes
I’ve not seen any hybrid Elaeagnus cultivars available. I was always curious about the potential of such a cross, so I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of it. Goumi IS pretty good, but I prefer the better autumn olives. They’re at least as tasty, and can be picked in a fraction of the time. I have 3 varieties of autumn olive that are comparable in size to goumi, and know of others. One is yellow fruited. They don’t have the long stem as goumi does, so that’s a plus too- they don’t need to be de-stemmed.
The waxwings eat the vast majority of my goumis. They go for them when they’re not even ripe. The autumn olives seem not to disappear until they are truly ripe. I find if I time it right I can get a good harvest off of them. SWD is an issue for them, though, while goumi is well done by the time they show up. Autumn olives fruit SOOOO profusely that I find I can just hold a bucket below a branch and strip the fruit downward into the bucket. Each swipe nets you a couple of cups or more.
I still think a cross would be interesting. I’d imagine it might potentially produce a more substantial fruit that combined the best features of each. If they crossed that readily, though, Od think hybrids would be more well known and readily available. I’m growing both, and have been tempted to do some controlled crosses, but have yet to.
2 Likes
Are all of your Red Gem fruit close to spherical like that, rather than the more cylindrical shape of the Sweet Scarlet?
1 Like
@murky …
The two red ones in this pic are sweet scarlet.
Some are a little oblong and some more round.
Could not find any more fruit on my red gem… i pruned both of my goumies this spring… and they produced a lot less fruit than last year.
There is a little size and shape differece in my RG and SS but it is minimal. They are similar.
The pic above shows 2 SS picked today and that much larger and more oblong shaped carmine fruit. It is moving closer to ripe…
Below shows the leaves of my carmine grafts… they are quite a bit larger than SS or RG.
6 Likes
Which ones do you like?
1 Like
I have several that I’ve selected locally with superior fruiting characteristics. There are a couple of locations near me where substantial conservation plantings were made. Adjacent to those plantings, there are large numbers of seedlings that have colonized some of the most abused patches of ground. I’ve selected 4 individuals with large fruit. Each is similar in size or perhaps slightly smaller than my sweet scarlet goumi. This makes them about 2-3 times the size of typical autumn olive fruit. They are all low astringency- sweet and good out of hand. One of them, the latest of the bunch, is a yellow fruited one. They are quite uncommon, IME.,Together they make for about a 1 month harvest window. I’d definitely recommend checking out your local autumn olives if you have some nearby. There are some good genetics out there for the pickin’
3 Likes
Oh nice! No autumn olive here except what I try to plant. I’ve seen some pics of real nice production on those conservation plantings back east. This state never got into them too much although I think they were involved with helping to develop one variety. Never enough rain for them to become invasive… although they decided to call them that… I suppose because it’s easier to follow the lead of states that actually get rain.
1 Like
I don’t find them particularly aggressive, I.e. expansive or dispersive here. They are very persistent though once they take up residence. They manage to grow in some of the worst most polluted, denuded pure mineral soil. Perhaps they manage to get out of control to some degree elsewhere, but I haven’t seen it happen here. I think they may be somewhat problematic for hay and pasture management, though nowhere near the level of glossy buckthorn, multi flora rose, and tartarian honeysuckle, from what I’ve seen. Invasive-ness is a thorny issue, but what I can’t seem to understand is why/how people can create those type of habitats and then bemoan the fact that something dares to grow there. The other angle that I find telling is that these “problematic” species seem to travel in packs. Where you find one, you find several. In most of metro-northeast this is the dominant eco type. As that metro culture expands and sprawls into the rural areas, this eco type seems to travel with it. I don’t doubt that there are real costs inflicted, but I find the analysis and perceived causality pretty foolish for the most part. Not that I have the answer, mind you…
3 Likes
I would enjoy being able to harvest them. We have issues with eastern red cedars and elms. Of course they were widely distributed for wildlife or windbreak protection. The cedar might even be classified as invasive even though they are native. At least the cedar don’t resprout when cut off. The majority of land around here has been tilled under so what’s really invasive or natural at this point? The state heavily promotes pheasants and they aren’t native either… and likely compete with some native birds. We have the occasional, isolated stray russian olive now and then… which came from a wildlife planting back in the 40s or 50s. One old tree is barely hanging on from that original planting.
3 Likes
This. So much this.
I wish the definition of invasive included a clause about being in undisturbed habitat. If a plant spreads into pristine habitats, say longleaf pine savanna, virgin or at least climax mixed hardwood forests, or undisturbed wetlands, and there out-competes the native plants, while providing fewer ecosystem services, etc, then yes, it’s invasive.
But if it colonizes old fields, urban blight, suburban margins, or clear cut forests, then no, it’s not the plant that’s invasive, it’s the ecosystem that’s invasive. If anything, those plants are making those broken ecosystems a little less broken. Notice how the vast majority of “invasive” species are pioneer plants? Yeah, maybe it’s the disturbance that nuked the native species and created a giant hole in the ecosystem, and not the plant trying to fill that hole, that’s the problem.
Anyway, rant over.
7 Likes
I’d add also that a major flaw in the discourse around “invasive species” is that it’s overly broad and not sufficiently descriptive. Just look at the concept of “native invasive”: what does that even mean?
I personally much prefer the terminology proposed by Jacke and Toensmeier in their seminal “Edible Forest Gardens vols. 1 & 2”
They categorize problematic species based upon their actual mode of opportunism. So plants that spread vigorously from rhizomes they call “expansive”. Those that make a zillion seeds they call “dispersive”. And those that are nearly impossible to kill once they start growing somewhere, they call “persistent”.
Perhaps it would seem to be semantics to some, but this terminology is so much more descriptive of the actual behavior of said species and places them in context in the actual landscape. Knowing that a given plant is persistent but not expansive or dispersive informs the understanding of how problematic it’s presence is in a given landscape, and how it might best be managed. Of course, many to most opportunistic plants exhibit more than one of these traits, so there’s a lot of nuance to consider. It also frames these traits as ecological niches rather than aberrations. Vines are vigorous, pioneer species make lots seed that travels easily, etc. Nuance is about as universally good a thing as there is, in my estimation, and dumbing things down to more easily get the message out has limited utility and limited truth.
Though there are incidences of opportunistic species impacting relatively pristine environments, the leading edge of this problem is the ubiquitous haphazard anthropogenic landscape whose unintentional nature has unintended consequences.
10 Likes
I never had a crop failure with Goumi but this year my sweet scarlet set maybe a could dozen fruit. At the same time Raintree Select had its bet fruit set ever. Uniform ripening and the birds stop being intersted in red berries just in time to leave me with branches and branches full.
Anyway. I found a sweet scarlet berry burred in the branches yesterday and wow i was surprised how actually sweet and flavorful a fully ripe SS is.
4 Likes
cool, I have one of those somewhere and have never used it. Maybe that’s why I got it.
3 Likes