Putting Things in My Mouth

Here's my new enthusiasm...the berries on this odd shrub.

Here's the tale: these grow out in my field, here and there, in that way that says that seeds were scattered by birds. My neighbors just to the west had deliberately planted a whole row of them along their fence, as a privacy screen from the road, and I wouldn't doubt that those were a local source. (And though I've never seen a plant over 8 foot tall, Boone Electric insisted on destroying that whole row of nice shrubs, to protect, um, what? The electric lines high above that these shrubs would never reach?)

In any case, I've been trying to i.d. them for quite a while. My usual Geography wizards failed. (Our resident biogeography expert went back to 'I don't do shrubs.' Sigh.)

From the leaf color, that silvery underside, I started looking at Russian Olive.  The trees do look a lot like those fields of olives you see on the hillsides of Greece and Cyprus.  But the descriptions of the fruit just didn't match.

  

Forager's Harvest tells us that    

Fertilized flowers produce olive-shaped fruits that are typically a little smaller than a currant or pea. Unripe clusters of autumnberries hang all summer long with little change, remaining light, dull green. In fall they plump up and turn to a bright orange-red but remain coated with silvery flakes. Each ripe autumnberry contains one seed, and these are very distinct in appearance. Soft-shelled and constricted to a point on each end, the yellowish-tan seeds have prominent lines running their length.

Hmm...

Long hiatus. From some accidental weblink, I looked at Autumn Olive. And there in my fields, where I walk the dogs every morning and afternoon, easily a hundred gallons of fruit. Still, I hesitated, envisioning a CIS episode, featuring my bloating, purple-blue-green body writhing with local carrion fly maggots, my dogs whimpering in the background, being restrained by Animal Control, until that sudden camera focus for the jaded, pithy comment, and then cut to commercial. So, see, I exercise proper caution...

 

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/02/04/article-0-003F1C8600000258-646_233x292.jpg 

But then at the D & D Pub, I was talking to Becky as redneck karaoke revved up, and she said something about her several specialties, which include Master Gardener (a program I need to jump into!), and after I described this strange fruit, she said, sure, that's Autumn Olive. I finished a few more cans of Busch Light, and considered.
    

[Notice that the mountains are still there--"Same Classic Taste"--but "Special Edition."  Critters and trees on our mountains now!]

Then one afternoon last week, the temperature up there again in the high-80s-swelter range, I'm in the field with dogs, no shirt, no rush, and I remember to google, and yep, this Forager website convinces me I've got the right thing, and that it won't kill me, so I just start eat the alleged Autumn Berries. Ever prudent, I did email Matt and Soren: Subject line: "Those red berries."  Message, "I've decided those are autumn olive and that I should try some. I just did..."

I guess I neglected to mention to them that I was out in the field alone, except for dogs who probably wouldn't do the 911 thing, and if I fell over twitching, would not be visible from the road. Oops.  I wasn't a Boy Scout.

But everything was fine, no toxic kick, and the berries are delicious.

There are some issues.  Here's the official hostility:

From Nature.org, we get this history of this dire invader: 

The autumn olive is a native plant of China, Japan and Korea that made its way to the United States in 1830. In the 1950s it was widely promoted as a great way to provide wildlife habitat and erosion control in environmentally disturbed areas.Although it did make available habitat and food for wildlife, it soon became a major problem as autumn olive began to rapidly spread throughout the state. To make matters worse, attempts to remove the shrub by cutting and/or burning created even more autumn olive.

They continue: 

Autumn olive is an invasive species that out-competes and displaces native plants by creating a dense shade that hinders the growth of plants that need lots of sun. It can produce up to 200,000 seeds each year, and can spread over a variety of habitats as its nitrogen-fixing root nodules allows the plant to grow in even the most unfavorable soils. Not to mention that it reproduces quickly and with little effort at all.   Birds are quite attracted to the seeds, and will scatter them throughout pastures, along roadsides and near fences. Even attempting to remove autumn olive by cutting or burning from your property can cause unwanted spreading as the shrub germinates easily.

From the Missouri Department of Conservation, a group I tend to trust over everyone else, at least for identification, we hear that the Autumn Olive is

Invasive. It was studied in the 1940s by the Soil Conservation Service, and the strain 'Cardinal' was released in 1963 for commercial propagation. In the eastern and central United States, autumn olive was planted to provide food and cover for wildlife, as screens, windbreaks and barriers along highways, to stabilize and revegetate road banks, and to reclaim mine spoil. For some years after planting the plant seems contained, but then it suddenly becomes invasive and difficult to control.

And nice info about its life cycle: 

Plants flower and develop fruits annually after reaching 3 years of age, although 2-year-old plants have been known to flower. A single plant can produce up to 8 pounds of fruit. Seed dispersal appears to be mainly by falling fruit and by birds. Birds seem to be the primary vector for dispersal, although raccoons, skunks and opossums are also known to eat the fruit. This species is highly invasive and difficult to control. Burned, mowed or cut plants will resprout vigorously.

The MoDOC conclusion, the "Autumn olive’s invasive nature far outweighs any useful qualities, and its cultivation is strongly discouraged."  Well, I might not go with them there.
They do tell us that "this non-leguminous, nitrogen-fixing woody shrub can adversely affect the nitrogen cycle of the native communities that depend on infertile soils. These characteristics make it an aggressive and competitive threat to native species in open communities such as prairies, savannas and woodlands." Huh. Something that fixes nitrogen in poor soils.  

Forager's Harvest adds this:  

Autumnberry is one of the few non-leguminous plants able, with the help of certain bacteria called Frankia, to fix Nitrogen. This allows it to thrive on impoverished or eroded soils and outcompete other shrubs on such sites. It is precisely for this reason that it was used widely to reclaim and stabilize old mine spoils, eroded hillsides, and newly constructed roadways. Such soil-deprived sites are where it remains most common today, accounting for its abundance in steep, hilly country that has been inappropriately cultivated or overgrazed, and in rocky, sandy, or gravelly areas where the soil is naturally poor.

[Ok, here's one of my naive flights-of-fancy.  Have been reading Gaia Vince's Adventures in the Anthropocene for a class, and just today, hit Chapter 4, with its history of artificial fertilizers, that way that we use soluble ammonia to keep those fields going.  So much so, that Vince claims that "Half of the protein in our bodies now comes from ammonia made in the Haber-Bosch process.  Billions of people owe their daily bread, rice and potatoes to artificial fertilizers" (108).  That, of course, is the jolly side of the Green Revolution, and its successive shades. 

Rethinking development in the 21st century - Vandana Shiva at the Governance Innovation Week 2014   

Here, I have to let that science-fiction-trained-mind drift ahead, into some Anthropocene not-quite-apocalypse, and wonder when and where we might need alternate strategies for every part of our food cycle. Alternate, as in, fertilizers that don't overwhelm the fields and kill the oceans.  Wish I had access to some Forestry/biochem genius, who could whip out calculations on whether we could rehab overused fields with however many years of Autumn Olive.  10 years?  15?  How many fields in rotation would make this useful?  Would Autumn Olive and their microbial buddies make enough difference to exhausted soil?  Could we find could uses for the shrub-wood when those were cleared?]

Meanwhile, Forager's Harvest adds that "Autumnberry may be found in southern Canada and all but the driest parts of the United States. In some regions it is rampantly abundant, and I will dare to say that this is the most common edible wild fruit in the eastern United States." And that, 

Upon first turning red, the flavor of autumnberries reminds me of raspberries or pomegranates with the pucker of chokecherries. As they ripen the puckering quality fades, the fruit sweetens, and a hint of tomato flavor develops. I love to eat fully ripe autumnberries straight from the bush. I stuff my face with one handful after another for the first twenty minutes of picking. The seedshells are soft and contain a delicious nutty kernel that seems to disappear in your mouth as you chew. Some people swallow everything, but I spit out the masticated seedshells when I am done absorbing all the flavor possible, then reach for another handful.

Beyond this spit or swallow advice, another source, Wildcrafting, states that "The berries also contain high levels of vitamins A, C and E, and flavonoids and essential fatty acids." More nutrition info here...which stresses the high levels of lycopene, and here's some folks who want us to make some wine out of my happy handful of red berries.

Here's the not-conservation conclusions:

Wildcrafting:  "There is great value in many of the wild (and escaped) plants around us. If we rely on marketers to point out what is of value, we’ll miss much of the natural world and its intrinsic benefits. Here is a plant that is both a treasure and a bane. Certainly a partial solution is to eat as many berries as possible, don’t replant it, and let it help you to be healthier."

And Forager guy: "If our continent is going to be overrun by exotic invasive plants, I pray that there are more of them like autumnberry."

I'll eat to that.

later, bob