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.

In Holland i found a place where the dunes are invested by Eleagnus species, angustifolia as well as umbellata and multiflora i suspect. They've become all the rage because as people are looking to plant gardens that will flourish, garden centers have provided them with these plants since they're hard as nails and nitrogen fixing and don't mind growing on sand.
So in this touristy village people have been growing them in their gardens and made hedges with them, especially the evergreen ones. The birds have discovered them as well and have done a great job of infesting the dunes. I've seen this part of the dunes change rapidly. It's now infested by three types of pioneering non native plants. I don't know if i have to jump up and down in joy or weep big tears of sorrow, because i noticed the Rosa rugosa, Japanese Rose which is an invasive for 50 years seems to have created a nice soil out of where nothing but some grasses grew. Now with the Eleagnus taking it's place a bit higher on the dunes it's soil building properties are showing they make place for native shrubs and hardy oaks to take foothold whereas this previously was unthinkable. Attracting birds and so on, helping to spread the seeds while fertilizing with droppings.
It's becoming a forest slowly. Where only ever hardy grasses grew of which the function was to hold the dunes in place. I don't really see the loss for the ecosystem as the function remains similar, keep the soil from eroding away, keep the dunes in place.
It probably will push out local endangered flora and fauna, but i don't know what we should do about that as it all started out with people wanting to have gardens. And they don't want to be busy with watering so plant hardy cheap plants that need no maintenance.

Anyway, i live in a place where i try goumi for years, it takes a long while to grow and become a good chop and drop plant. Those tiny berries i can't be arsed to collect, but the birds seem happy to oblige. Maybe if they were some bigger i thought. So i ordered and exchanged goumi that were suposed to be bigger and better, but nurseries seem to lie about what the end result will be constantly. i guess they don't really know what they sell themselves, they just seem to follow trends and sell whatever is easy to propagate easily from cuttings.

So to the bewilderment of passersby i risked my life going into the overgrown prickly dunes and collect cuttings from the differing eleagnus species and i suspect that it is a wildly diverse hybrid swarm containing maybe even inter-specific crosses. How could i not, the dune protecting organizations already know about this outbreak, i looked it up and one day they'll start destroying  this genetic treasure for sure without blinking their eyes, just because they're of the opinion that everything should stay as is.

I'm going to grow these out in France, hoping i will not be unlucky and destroy the whole of Burgundy, burying it under a thicket of unstoppable Eleagnus. No i'd rather grow something worthwhile in the function of a hedge or shrub with sizeable sweet berries that like to be chopped and dropped under fruittrees profiting of it's nitrogen fixing abilities and soil building properties.
the photos are the cuttings and the situation in June and in winter.

Hugo Morvan wrote:

Now with the Eleagnus taking it's place a bit higher on the dunes it's soil building properties are showing they make place for native shrubs and hardy oaks to take foothold whereas this previously was unthinkable.

I have read of a river delta in the USA where when they stopped trying to eradicate an invasive non-native plant, the plant cleaned up the water enough that the native plants were able to survive and start recovering.

If you look on a geological time scale, there was a time when absolutely nothing but ice was growing where I live (more than once in fact). Even if humans were less good a polluting/changing the environment, it would still change over time through natural processes of geology. Often there isn't a single "right" answer - as always with permaculture, "it depends".

One of the problems with invasive plants, esp. those that really take over an ecosystem, is that our local insects can't eat them for food.
Insects are in decline world wide at an alarming rate, and they are at the foundation of our food web, just above soil microbes. We need insects, and not just for pollination. As insects go, so do we. Insects and the plants they eat evolved together, and local insects mostly can't eat invasives  
because of toxins the plant developed to keep predators from eating it. The insects that evolved with the plant species evolved the mechanisms to thwart the plants defenses. It's not just phytophagous insects that starve when invasives out compete the local flora, it's the insects that eat the phytophagous insects that suffer too, and the birds and small mammals that eat them, and on up the chain. It could take thousands of years of evolution for local insects to evolve to eat an invasive from Asia, let's say. We don't have that much time so save the local flora and fauna.
It's the out competing of out local flora that's the problem with invasives, not that every invasive is bad--some are not aggressive and can live side by side with the local plants. And, of course there are other things causing the insect decline; pesticides, loss of habitat, etc...

I catch a lot of flak from some people, but I adore Autumn Olive! The smell of the landscape when in flower, the bees in a frenzy in the blooms, the astounding yields of highly nutritious and delicious berries, the fact it can grow in almost all extremes of drought, poor soil, heat, cold, and it enriches the land it is in, setting the stage for later succession tree species.......I could go on and on about AO!

@Steve Clausen I don't know if insects eat eleagnus species. The birds sure do, so somehow it will profit the local flora by droppings and soil building. There didn't grow much in these dunes traditionally but a grass that did so poorly the government had to come in and replant it every so often or wind erosion would blow away so many sand that the dunes disappeared, creating a weak spot. The high tide and storm combined used to create sea breakthroughs creating small brakkish lakes land inwards. Precious habitat that now is disappearing. Human activity and natural disturbance create real chances for niche creating. Conservatists try to keep a naturally dynamic system stable. I'm old enough to know that once endangered species can make a huge comeback, Storks and Cormorants and foxes come to mind. Many species find their way into cities now. They overcome some fear and profit of a once unobtainable rich habitat and thrive.

I agree pesticides do a lot of damage. I suspect it's killing of soil life and bacteria so there simply is no food for life up the foodchain which is them. I try to eat as little of them as possible and i am actively creating a habitat that is biodiverse and have observed how planting biodivese creates a stabalizing insect influx and i eat eat of that landscape. But the general insect decline there is not a lot i can do to influence that. People are poorer every day and want cheap food, they want to keep unaware that spray load is getting absolutely ridiculous.

I live on very poor granite soils and hope to find inside this diverse rewilded Eleagnus population some genetic diversity that would cost thousands of dollars/euro's to obtain. The crosses nature decided to drop in the dunes would take years to achieve.

I visited a website and know that government is fully aware of this infestation, they don't move a finger. Maybe they like the soil building qualities and are the anti-erosion qualities of this plague and are studying this situation. Maybe they're lacking the resources to do so, they're not open about the plan and if there even is a plan. I'm nothing but a passionate permaculturist who's interested in the forest building dynamic these infestations seem to bring along. I see Elder popping up where there was none, i see annuals that grow in winter, i see some oaks species appearing i see other local berry carrying shrubs appearing. I'm far from convinved that this evolution is a net negative for insect populations in general in the long run. And even less convinced that fighting it by removing them is an effective way to change the situation, which it has proven many times over they're not capable of effectively removing them once established. They've poisoned whole areas in a fight against the Rosa Rugosa and mechanically removed soil and sived through it for seeds, they've spend millions and still lose that fight that maybe shouldn't have been fought in the first place.

Nitrogen fixing qualities are mostly seen as a negative while it's proven to be forest forming which is nothing but a net carbon sink which we try to create artificially. It doesn't make sense to me at all. Why do conservationist feel we can't  create forestlike situations by making use of invasive shrubs?

Hugo Morvan wrote:@Steve Clausen I don't know if insects eat eleagnus species. The birds sure do, so somehow it will profit the local flora by droppings and soil building. There didn't grow much in these dunes traditionally but a grass that did so poorly the government had to come in and replant it every so often or wind erosion would blow away so many sand that the dunes disappeared, creating a weak spot. The high tide and storm combined used to create sea breakthroughs creating small brakkish lakes land inwards. Precious habitat that now is disappearing. Human activity and natural disturbance create real chances for niche creating. Conservatists try to keep a naturally dynamic system stable. I'm old enough to know that once endangered species can make a huge comeback, Storks and Cormorants and foxes come to mind. Many species find their way into cities now. They overcome some fear and profit of a once unobtainable rich habitat and thrive.

I agree pesticides do a lot of damage. I suspect it's killing of soil life and bacteria so there simply is no food for life up the foodchain which is them. I try to eat as little of them as possible and i am actively creating a habitat that is biodiverse and have observed how planting biodivese creates a stabalizing insect influx and i eat eat of that landscape. But the general insect decline there is not a lot i can do to influence that. People are poorer every day and want cheap food, they want to keep unaware that spray load is getting absolutely ridiculous.

I live on very poor granite soils and hope to find inside this diverse rewilded Eleagnus population some genetic diversity that would cost thousands of dollars/euro's to obtain. The crosses nature decided to drop in the dunes would take years to achieve.

I visited a website and know that government is fully aware of this infestation, they don't move a finger. Maybe they like the soil building qualities and are the anti-erosion qualities of this plague and are studying this situation. Maybe they're lacking the resources to do so, they're not open about the plan and if there even is a plan. I'm nothing but a passionate permaculturist who's interested in the forest building dynamic these infestations seem to bring along. I see Elder popping up where there was none, i see annuals that grow in winter, i see some oaks species appearing i see other local berry carrying shrubs appearing. I'm far from convinved that this evolution is a net negative for insect populations in general in the long run. And even less convinced that fighting it by removing them is an effective way to change the situation, which it has proven many times over they're not capable of effectively removing them once established. They've poisoned whole areas in a fight against the Rosa Rugosa and mechanically removed soil and sived through it for seeds, they've spend millions and still lose that fight that maybe shouldn't have been fought in the first place.

Nitrogen fixing qualities are mostly seen as a negative while it's proven to be forest forming which is nothing but a net carbon sink which we try to create artificially. It doesn't make sense to me at all. Why do conservationist feel we can't  create forestlike situations by making use of invasive shrubs?

There's no one answer Hugo. There's been cases where invasives that out competed natives in an environment were used as nurse plants for other natives. And when those other natives got large enough, they shaded out the invasive, so it's an evolving situation for sure. Oaks are good! At least here in the eastern United States, oaks are by far the most important host plant for caterpillars, hosting a whopping 534 different lepidoptera species. And these caterpillars feed more insects, birds and other animals. And, an oak's nut mast feed a lot of wildlife. So maybe in your situation, the oaks will win out in the end.

I've been foraging autumn olive for many years.

I like 'em,
I love 'em,
I want some more of 'em.

I've also been closely observing their growth habits and relative invasive character. They absolutely take over vacant lots... whose ecology have previously been utterly destroyed! A random autumn olive will grow in road-side ditches where there are mainly grasses. They multiply fairly well in worn out ag fields. And they absolutely cannot thrive in a diverse native landscape.

Notably, they need full sun. If forest grows up over them they kind of fade away.

As far as this permie is concerned,  they're downright heroic.

From a gustative perspective, there is a wide range of flavor. When I'm foraging with the kids we taste all the bushes on a lot before deciding which ones to take time gathering.

There is also a wide range of size and spot patterns--as much variation as there is in apples, for instance. So there is great potential for a breeding program to improve size and flavor.

Basically, I'm enamored,  and here are a few of my Instagram posts to prove it.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DATmlPvps7u/?igsh=MXh6Ymd4eXl5ajMzbg==

https://www.instagram.com/p/C_-xmchJH5y/?igsh=MTByeHoyemg4M2RuNQ==

https://www.instagram.com/p/CU0vdizJpX4/?img_index=1&igsh=aGhnaHBjcm53cmsw