no fruit on my autumn olive

Aug 29, 2004 1 Replies

Hello peoples! My autumn olive has been in the ground for three years now and is a pretty shrub about five feet tall and four feet wide. Very fast growing! It bloomed great last year and this year but neither year has it produced any fruits! I am told it is self-pollinating, is this wrong? I wanted the fruits!


For what it's worth, it took a few years for my nursery-obtained Autumn Olive to fruit; the birds strip it clean very fast, on top of that.

The native-growing Autumn Olive in Central Ohio, which looks indistinguishable, has very little fruit, sometimes none that I can detect. They all bloom though.

What I had wanted was Russian Olive, which has fruit that last into the winter; but every seedling of dozens planted in various ways at various times bloomed and then died in a couple months. It doesn't like something about the soil. A guy a few miles away had the same experience with Russian Olive, which is supposed to have gotten weed status in some states.

Autumn Olive does great, though, as far as getting huge goes.

I'm wondering about Buffalo Berry, which grows great too but produces no fruit, so far (7 years); not that it matters because it would also be producing fruit when there's lots of bird food around rather than in the winter, which is what I really wanted.

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