I've gotten nice trees from Stark and OGW. Remember that people like to complain more than they like to compliment. Those businesses wouldn't last if they weren't good.

Out of curiousity, why do you want those? I honestly haven't seen anything that makes me want them.

OGW listed above has specialized in sea buckthorn for decades now.

Keep in mind the plants need lots of room, are thorny, and labor intensive to harvest and process, compared to many other fruits.

Thanks for the comments. I don't want them for the fruits more for the look in the garden almost as a screen on one side. I have a good 30 ft section for them full sun and kind of dry. Im not expecting huge plants just a decent plant for what I am paying. I agree people love to complain so I will think it over and order a male and female. Ogw was the cheapest out of the options as well

Ampersand12:
They are quite ornamental and very tough as well. The juice is absolutely delicious, making a great substitute for orange juice that has even more health benefits and best of all, you can grow the plant yourself in cold climates!

Thanks fab, I thought I read some people say they taste nasty... I guess I assumed the nursery listings were overstating the taste!

If I had more room I might try it out for an ornamental, perhaps someday.

A row of seaberry plants can be used as a hedge, but the screening will be spotty as they do not have a uniformly dense growth habit like many shrubs used for that purpose.

You would get a nice blue-green color. These could not be sheared, they can be selectively pruned. If you are not much interested in the fruit, get 4 or 5 males and one female to cover 30 feet. Males get uniformly large quickly, females less so.

The fallen leaves make a fine mulch.

All of those nurseries are top rate. I have bought off all of them, excellent list of nurseries! Raintree is fantastic! Territorial is a great seed company with many one of a kind seeds. Not sure about their trees?

Sea buckthorn... perhaps the most sour thing I have ever tasted. They do fruit incredibly heavily though, and the dense yellow fruit clusters do look nice.

don555:
You're right about how sour they taste -- at least most of the varieties. But don't let this fool you into thinking they have no culinary value! After all, lemons and limes are extremely sour as well, right?

Well, I was fooled after tasting the berries right off the shrub, until I finally tried making the juice, sweetened of course. Everyone I gave it to loved it.

As you can see by reading the catalog from One Green World, much work has gone into new cultivars of this plant throughout it's native range, where it is highly prized for everything from preserves and juice to flavoring ice cream and making medicine.

cranberries aren't sweet either, but they have become a billion dollar crop. And ease of harvest is the only thing stopping SB from becoming one too.

fab, you've got me curious. They are planted in native plantings by the city here, and I know of a large patch of them in a city park not far from me. I see the One Green World folks harvest them by cutting and freezing the branches, then knock the frozen fruit off. I obviously can't cut city park bushes, but we've been hovering between -15C and -30C here the past week or more, so maybe I could just knock some berries off of the live bushes, as long as the berries are still on the bushes (I haven't looked since October). I'll have to act soon though, as things are supposed to warm above freezing in a day or two, and give us a bit of a January thaw over the next week or more.

>>some people say they taste nasty.Very true!
Don,..be careful, I'm sure, you MUST put some extra sugar in!

But...there are some newer cultivars tasting sweet!
I'm still in the process of finding them.

Okay, I've got frozen berries. Now what? I presume I want to rinse them next to remove any dust and such. Anyone have a recipe they use to turn them into juice? I saw one web recipe where they said to add almost as much sugar as berries. These don't seem as sour as the ones I tried a couple years ago. But the ones a few years back were picked in early September, and these ones I harvested frozen today (January 12) so they've had the fall and half of winter to mellow.

A few photos...Here's the berry patch:
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Lots of berries on those snowy branches.
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Temperature about -14C (7F), which is the warmest in about a week... just coming to the end of a cold snap. So it was easy to whack berries off with a piece of wooden dowel and into a plastic lid. Took about one minute to knock these off. This is about one-half of what I gathered, ie two minutes collecting time.
{{gwi:2118704}}

Cleaning them of twigs, stems and leaves took longer, probably about 45 minutes. But here's what I ended up with, about 4-6 cups I think. Now how to make juice? BTW, I cleaned the berries outside to keep them frozen, then moved them directly into our freezer, so they are still frozen.
{{gwi:2118705}}

My experience with sea buckthorn in my Z5, dry area is: they are very hardy, male more so than female. They will survive here with no attention, but grow far better if irrigated and fertilized. The deer have to be very hungry to eat them. One male in a bed with drip irrigation is very invasive, sending up shoots everywhere, so keep that in mind for warmer wetter climates.

The females are slower growing. Fruit (juice) is delicious but does need sweetener. I got most of my plants from OGW, and would recommend them. I can't say if there varieties are really sweeter than average (nothing to compare to), but they are edible right off the plant (but sour).

After the second time processing these I stopped worrying about getting out every little piece of debris. Instead I just pick the biggest pieces out by hand, and some more comes out by skimming when I rinse off the berries.

The way I make juice is put 2 cups of the berries into the blender and fill to the 8 cup mark with water. Then I add around 3/4 cup sugar (this depends on taste, and other sweeteners can of course be used), blend, strain through a wire strainer, and enjoy.
So your 4-6 cups should make 1 to 1-1/2 gallons of juice. Not bad when you consider how many oranges it would take to get that much juice!

By the way, here is a link to a previous conversation I started when I first tried this: http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/fruit/msg1112335319236.html

Good luck, and let us know how it goes!

I used 5 cups water to 2 cups seaberry juice and about a cup of sugar. If you want a sweet product without so much sugar, use stevia powder; then you can almost eliminate the sugar.

The cleanest juice is made by using auger-type slow rpm juicers. Otherwise run the juice through fine mesh, jelly bag, etc. Blender methods may result in ground seed in the product; give this time to settle out. And I would be concerned about needle-like thorn remnants with some methods.

Stored juice quickly separates into two distinct layers, a clear layer and a thicker pigmented one. Just shake before serving.

In the warmer zones, the fruit will go bad before seasonal freezes more common to zone 3a above. Freezing whole branches and flailing them around is one method; but for home garden quantities, just hand-picking may not take much more time. Break the tips off the thorns before working a branch, speeds the harvest.

The flavor is a mix of apricot and cantaloupe to my taste.

Thanks for the links and tips. So people process these by blending fresh berries and water, then straining? My typical way of making juice from something like hardy blue grapes is to simmer the fruit with a bit of water for 20 minutes or so, then strain through a jelly bag. Then add sugar to taste in the resulting juice.

Is there a reason to not process sea buckthorn berries similar to grapes, ie by simmering in water? Or do people just use the blender method because it is easier or faster?

I don't know why it is done this way, but not having to cook them is certainly much better, saves time and energy. Think of it like regular orange juice, or more accurately, like lemonade.

You also get more product this way than what you describe for hardy blue grapes, and this also happens to work well for the particular taste profile of the sea berry.

I have male and female trees in my garden for several years. Male as Steve said is very invasive.
I just use juice maker to extract juice which I heat with sugar. But I am growing this mainly for making oil from seeds. It's my medicine for different problems.

The seaberry flavor is plenty strong enough for the simmering fruit in water method.

I would amend my above advise by saying that use of a jelly or muslin or cheesecloth bag requires the use of force by squeezing pure juice rather than just letting it drip because seaberry oils and pigments can be quite thick.

The simmered method with added water might let the result drip through the bag.

The auger juicer is 90% efficient with seaberries, only the skins and seeds are discarded, dry product is only about 10% of total input fruit weight.

{{gwi:123443}}

I juice all my berries fresh without heating / cooking...,just to retain more of the good stuff,...like vitamin and minerals.

Haven't done buckthorn yet,..but raspberries, chokecherries, grapes, pears, apples, cherries, veggies etc.

This post was edited by konrad___far_north on Tue, Jan 13, 15 at 22:30

I have kept it simple, passing the blended mixture through a fine wire kitchen strainer. I am not at all bothered by the heavier stuff or the separation that occurs, I just stir before serving, just like I have to do with any fruit juice from concentrate, or any juice that has some pulp with in it.

I don't know why anyone would want to cook their juice unless they're looking for a specific service it might offer (pasteurization, destruction of phytotoxins, alteration of flavor, etc.).

So tonight I did a juice extraction by mashing 1 cup of fruit in 2 cups of water, simmering for 20 minutes, then extracting the juice with a jelly bag. I think the simmering method is done to yield a clear juice (especially for making jelly). The juice I got was quite clear, pale yellow, and I didn't observe any oily layer, just pale yellow juice. After tasting the raw juice (sour!), I added sugar in stages, finally ending up with 1/2 cup of sugar in my juice extract.

I found the sweetened juice to be initially quite pleasant -- kind of like a sweet-tart apricot flavor, but not quite like apricots. Pleasing though. However it had a faint and lingering bitter aftertaste that really ruined that intitial taste profile. I ended up chasing it down with some homemade grape juice to mask the bitter taste. I tried the buckthorn juice again later on, and didn't notice the bitter taste nearly so much, so maybe it's an acquired taste? Or maybe some varieties don't have the bitter aftertaste?

Well, I still have to try blending berries with water, blending and sweetening to taste, without cooking. Maybe tomorrow.

This post was edited by don555 on Thu, Jan 15, 15 at 2:57

Much of the appeal, nutrients, and perhaps flavor of seaberry products is in the color. That and the oils are more easily extracted with the more powerful mechanical juicer methods.

Initially I got good product using a hand-crank strainer such as used for tomatoes before buying the auger juicer.

Not sure where your bitter taste came from.

I only heat the juice enough to dissolve the sugar, just to a mildly steamy point, not close to boiling.