What are your thoughts on Autumn Olive?

Autumn olive is listed as invasive in Missouri. I have one in my property probably planted by a bird. However I don't see any seedlings around despite the abundant fruits it produced (for at least 3years). There is another wild one 500 ft down the road. It is one lone bush and there is no sight of spreading around either.  Am i having a variety of autumn olive that is not invasive? Or the seeds could still be dormant for a couple years before a thicket shows up?  Or maybe the local soil condition is not favorable for seed germination?

The tree is very fast growing and seems to be useful for coppicing and food.  I am still looking for sign of invasion before i go ahead and grow a few more from cuttings.  Any suggestion?

May Lotito wrote:Autumn olive is listed as invasive in Missouri. I have one in my property probably planted by a bird. However I don't see any seedlings around despite the abundant fruits it produced (for at least 3years). There is another wild one 500 ft down the road. It is one lone bush and there is no sight of spreading around either.  Am i having a variety of autumn olive that is not invasive? Or the seeds could still be dormant for a couple years before a thicket shows up?  Or maybe the local soil condition is not favorable for seed germination?

The tree is very fast growing and seems to be useful for coppicing and food.  I am still looking for sign of invasion before i go ahead and grow a few more from cuttings.  Any suggestion?

That is my experience as well.  So many people just read somewhere that a plant is invasive and it goes on the list of plants that you should never ever touch or have anything to do with.  Like most things in life, the answer is "it depends".

I live in West Virginia. Autumn olives are a nightmare of invasiveness here, worse than multiflora because if you dig out the crown of a multiflora, you've killed it but with autumn/Russian olives you have to dig out every bit of root. To the person who said he sees a single autumn olive that hasn't notably spread, I say GET RID OF IT WHILE YOU CAN! To those questioning whether goumi is a better option, I believed a book that said they were and got two--a Sweet Scarlet and Red Gem. This was 4 or 5 years ago. I've seen no sign of their spreading. They require zero care--I do prune them in February, to make picking in late June easier, not a lot of trouble and as some say, you can use the prunings. This year I'm going to use many of them as starter for cuttings to try to make lots more, to give away and I think I'll add a couple more in my orchard. They fix nitrogen, They have pretty silvery leaves and pleasant smelling flowers (so do the evil autumn olives). Every year I get lots of fruit--picking the berries in the main chore, it takes several hours over a couple of days. The negative is that the berries have sizable pits, and the only way I've found to deal with them is to steam the fruit  for 20 minutes or so and filter out the solids, then use the liquid for a syrup. They are loaded with antioxidant and other good things.
I think invasives generally do tend to settle into an ecosystem eventually, but it's also a matter of regional difference. I have Japanese honysuckle, and beat it back on the edge of the woods as it was doing too much damage to the woods, including the redbuds that ring my clearing and resumed their former spring glory when I beat back the honeysuckle. But I didn't get rid of the honeysuckle as I LOVE its scent. One year I realized it had crossed the clearing and was all over the copse on the other side, and tried to make a dent by ripping up the lacework of fine vines, hoping to at least have started the necessary eradication. To my surprise, that was it, it was gone the next year there. People talk about stiltgrass, and I don't get it--it's so easy to pull up, my definition of a "good weed," and you can just wad it up and use it as mulch. But I can see where it would be a problem if you farmed on a large scale. Wineberries--I deliberately planted a patch of those--the main negative is that I failed to eradicate autumn olive there first and have to keep snipping it out now. Wineberries are so pretty, and tasty. But they only bear once, while my red everbearing raspberries start in August and keep going until it frosts. The wineberries crossed the road in and established themselves in the copse aforementioned, and I wondered whether to get rid of them. But now that area is part of my chicken run--the predators got so bad I gave up on free range and we fenced a run which includes the orchard, this bit of copse, and a bit of open area above the garden. I had thoughts or running cord through the tops of the fruit trees and down to the fence to confuse hawks--but then thought, why don't I try making a sort of food forest instead, planting forbs and bushes that won't shade the fruit trees but will hide the chickens from above? I think, a couple more goumis, maybe some full dwarf fruit trees (that I can cover, as my next attempted solution to the squirrel problem), some wild sunflowers, chicory perhaps, more fennel, and as for the wineberries, all I have to do is not hinder their spread.

I live in the Ozarks of Mo now, but before here, just outside of Cincinnati,OH.  There our neighbor had about 10 acres that was covered with Russian olive, another eleagnus. He allowed both my sheep and horses to graze there and they took care of all the Russian olive plants.  Sheep eat low and the horses ate higher, and they kept eating off the new growth,which eventually killed the plants.  Here in MO,  I actually planted a couple Autumn olives near my chicken pen for them to feed themselves.   Here I have VERY sandy soil and the plants grow big but have never had a decent berry crop.  (I love the fruit!)  I wouldn't have planted them had there not been patches of them up and down the road.  They do spread where the planter cannot get to them to 'control'.  I would graft Goumi to them if I could find scionwood.  Anyone know  where to buy?  TYIA.

FWIW--not very much--my neighbor tried grafting some scions from my goumis onto autumn olive and it didn't take. But one try doesn't prove anything. Might be you need the right time of year, technique, et c.

Mary Cook wrote:I live in West Virginia. Autumn olives are a nightmare of invasiveness here, worse than multiflora because if you dig out the crown of a multiflora, you've killed it but with autumn/Russian olives you have to dig out every bit of root. To the person who said he sees a single autumn olive that hasn't notably spread, I say GET RID OF IT WHILE YOU CAN!

It doesn't seem as simple as that to me.  The person that hasn't seen them spread has had them for three years.  I've been planting them for more than ten.  Mine don't spread either.  Am I suddenly going to wake one day to find they have taken over the state?  An invasive somewhere can be very much non-invasive other places.  If they spread like crazy where you are, then I would say, don't plant them.  But places they don't spread?  Why not?  I love them, my chickens love them, they fix large amounts of nitrogen.  I think they are a great plant, in my circumstances.

With my own eyes, I haven't seen a "bad" plant. I haven't observed a plant damaging an ecosystem. Regardless of labels that people give to things, I haven't observed what I would call an "invasive" plant. I watch the ecosystem carefully.

By pure observation, I am not able to determine which species have lived in the local wildlands for ten years, 100 years,  530 years, or 10,000 years. All plants, that I observe with my own eyes, provide ecosystem services: food, shelter, shade, oxygen, etc. I can't tell any difference between long-time residents, and new arrivals.

Ten thousand years ago, Canada, and much of the usa was covered with glaciers. Every plant growing in those areas are non-native. My farm was covered in hundreds of feet of water at that time, thus all plants in my area are likewise non-native.

I welcome all life to my farm, and the surrounding wildlands. My definition of native is everything that is currently growing in the wildlands near my community.

Im in Michigan’s upper peninsula and have personally only found a couple Autumn Olive plants in this area. I took cuttings from one several years ago and just found that 3 of them are alive and well in my neglected nursery bed so I’m planning to plant them out today, just not sure where yet.

I could put them near the coop so the chickens can eat whatever berries fall, but I’m not sure if they would digest the seeds or basically just plant the seeds via their poop. I’d like to harvest as much of the fruit as I reasonably can by pruning and keeping the bushes relatively short.

My thoughts are a lot like Joseph’s. People say native and invasive, but native to when? Invasive where? I cant look in the mirror and see a human looking back at me and then go worry about a plant being invasive. We are the epitome of invasive species and nobody recommends suicide or genocide because of that. And who are we to say that our “native” plants should remain unchanged (like that was ever the case in the first place) or unthreatened by something new? What in life works that way? New things are always developing and causing adaptations, competition and evolution. Its life.

We have an abundance of European Buckthorn in the area and at our property. It’s similar to Autumn Olive in several ways, as far as I know. Both “invasive”, both similar sized, both have abundant fruit, both are nitrogen fixers (I think buckthorn is), both are fast growing, both are thicket forming and hard to get rid of. But buckthorn is super thorny, the berries arent edible to humans and i dont even think it’s good for most animals. Im thinking if I can hack away most of the buckthorn and let Autumn Olive take its place, maybe we will be left with a similar “invasive species” problem but this time at least have a bunch of edible fruit, chicken feed and less thorns from the whole mess. Plus they look nice. Buckthorn looks pretty nasty with its rough bark, thorns and tangled branches.