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’
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
all i could find was red gem, so i got it, i wanted red scarlet but one green world only had red gem. would you say it’s better, same in taste as the other varieties?
Good to hear, I read above on this post that they have a slight tomato-y aftertaste and few of my family members like tomatoes so I always held off. Thanks!
Mine have a sweet fruity flavor…sort of like fruit punch. If you pick them when first red can have some astringency… but let them hang for a few days and that leaves and only the fruit punch type flavor remains… the flavor is not strong not overly sweet… just a mildly sweet fruit punch flavor.
Refreshing… but not going to be your favorite fruit… but they do ripen early so may be about the only thing you have ripening in that time slot.
I have some early strawberries that ripen with them… end of April, first of May… when the goumies are done… raspberries and logans start.
I wonder if there would be any advantages of grafting a Goumi on to an Autumn Olive root stock, then prune away any suckers from the root stock to form a tree like bush?
The main advantage would be that it would allow you to acquire difficult to buy varieties cause even though the plants are in short supply, scion for grafting is not.
