Eleagnus multiflora - goumi

From Tripple Brook Farm www.tripplebrookfarm.com.

These are good sized fairly mature goumi bushes.

This one is pruned to tree form.

We pruned back perhaps 2/3 of our goumi last winter to make room for other plants around it. Only branches that were new last year remain, and they have not set huge yields as the older branches do. Kind of a no-brainer, but it appears that you can't coppice goumi and have high yields immediately following.The size of the fruit is much larger however, we couldn;t keep up with the incredible yields anyway, so less fruit but of higher quality is a good thing.

Goumi grows very vigorously for us. It sets huge loads of fruit, though the only picture I have is from its first year of fruiting. Ours must have had 800-1000 mini-cherries on it this year. The pits require some kind of food mill or something if you want to process all that fruit, they are too small to pit by hand.

When really ripe they are quite good, otherwise they are astringent and sour.

Ours tends to ripen when strawberries do, and in good strawberry years it gets neglected. In bad strawberry years we eat a lot of it. In 2010 we will build on our 2009 experiments and make fruit leather by the pound.

We prune our goumi very hard, probably cut 50% of growth each year, still plenty of fruit but allows more nitrogen release for our persimmon.

Seems to grow and fruit very well for us in partial shade.

Kind of spiny, can be a pain when it grows over a pathway.