A delicious and beautiful fruiting shrub with four season interest and prolific spring blooms, Goumi Berries are truly one of the most versatile plants you can have in your edible landscape. They are:
- Easy to grow and establish,
- Packed with antioxidants, phytonutrients, and medicinal compounds (it actually defeats its more trendily known counterpart, GOJI berry, which are NOT easy to grow here in the South, in all of these nutritional categories). This level of nutrition is virtually impossible to find at any price when you add in picking them raw into the equation.
- They’re also nitrogen fixers, collaborating with bacteria in the rhizosphere (root zone) atmospheric nitrogen and making it available to other surrounding plants and increasing soil fertility over time. The dominant image in our culture of orchards being lined in rows and surrounded by grass needs to evolve as grass is a huge nitrogen deficit for the plants that feed us and fruit trees/shrubs ideally need 30-60% of their surrounding canopy to be nitrogen fixing.
- Also they have silver *glitter* on their skin: clearly goumi’s bring the party both to your mouth and your favorite place to hang out (rave, disco, dive bar, PTA bake sale, Bulls game, etc)
Goumi’s can help create a dynamic and beautiful synergy in edible landscapes. They also thrive with very little effort in areas with limited gardening space as they can be pruned down to 3-4′ every other year. Lastly the taste is remarkable on this silver glittered fruit! Kids (untainted by grownup cynicism!) are usually the best judge of fruits, we’ve found, and they simply go crazy for Goumi Berries. Even kids that don’t have fruit as a regular part of their diet. Many say they taste like…can you guess?…Gummy Bears, of course!
Check out our partners at Useful Plants info sheet on Goumi Berries