Has anyone here tried the edible berries? I just ordered a tree and hope to live long enough to experience their taste.
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This thread may impress you.
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Yes, I’ve eaten them. Famine food, at best. Pulp is kind of gritty, has a flavor somewhat reminiscent of pawpaw, to me. Small, stony seeds.
I just kind of ‘massage’ the ripe fruits, tear out the stem, and suck out the pulp, then spit out the seeds.
Back in the day on the old GardenWeb or the NAFEx discussion list, someone said that they made their heartrate shoot up to an uncomfortable rate. I never encountered that phenomenon.
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I have also tried the mkousse berries. They taste like a tropical fruit.
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I tried them from several trees. Not much flesh, not much flavor, wouldn’t bother with common trees found in the US. I can see that breeding for better fruit may have a place- the taste was pleasant and distantly tropical, but certainly not exciting.
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Im definitely gonna check this thread out when I get back on Sun. Thanks
I ordered the trees, dosent look like they would do fantastic in my climate but Im gonna give it a try regardless. Hopefully after doing some research I can find something more suited to my heat.
imho They are modestly sweet, with a very faint, delicate flavor that is quite a nondescript. Probably even less appetizing than mulberries that I have tried. There is quite a bit of variability in the quality, however. I have foraged on them in Boston, as well as in a local park here in the DC area. Currently I’m growing a scarlet decorative specimen, which has a relatively small fruit, And I have a really small specimen of a Milky Way kousa that is supposed to be one of the better tasting ones. It is too small to have produced for it yet, however.
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IDK how much, if any, selection has been made for fruit quality.
‘Big Apple’ is a selection with larger than average fruit size.
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They can be really tasty, sweet, and can vary in flavor quite a bit. I enjoy a few when I visit someone who has them but they give too little pulp to be useful for much. The pulp in the center is good but can be seedy and the pulp near the skin is too gritty. I think that there is good potential for decent fruit if they were bred for large fruit size to minimize grittiness and seediness. I’d be very interested in buying a plant if there was a particularly large fruited variety available.
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Any idea how big the fruits get on that variety? I think they would have to be at least twice as large as a typical kousa berry for me to want to grow a tree for the fruit.
Have never seen it. Only references to it.
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‘Big Apple’ is available from a seller on Etsy right now. I’ve bought other plants from the same seller in the past and found them to be of generally good quality for mail order.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1176994205/cornus-kousa-big-apple-large-fruit
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I tried Big Apple at a nursery that was growing in a 7 gallon pot maybe 10 years ago. All I can remember is that it wasn’t as good as several NOID Kousa trees I have sampled in landscapes on my travels. After that I no longer was interested in obtaining that variety.
The best tasting one I ever tried was almost good enough to try to propagate but I don’t need another tree that I have put a net over to keep the birds away. The NOID Kousa I have in my yard is good enough for a yearly snack for a couple days.
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We bought one and planted it early spring 2020.
This year 2025… it had first blossoms. Only a few… 15-20.
And they produced some nice sized red fruit this fall… I ate several of them and they were quite delicious.
I did not eat the entire fruit… just cut them open and mashed the pulp out. It tasted quite fruity and a little like persimmon pulp.
I bet this next year it will bloom more generously and we will get more fruit.
The red fruit drops when ripe.
TNHunter
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So I’m a bit biased against them. Because I have one that the HOA planted that I’m not allowed to remove. It hangs over my walkway into my house and leaves hundreds of berries on my sidewalk and into my living room.
That being said I tried one or 2 of them before and they aren’t bad at all. It is similar-ish to pawpaw but different. Has a custard consistency, they have to be dead ripe (very soft). The thing that makes them also a pain is that they have a very rough and hard skin and then a pea sized stone. so to me they aren’t worth my time trying to do anything other than use my snow shovel to get them off my sidewalk.
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