Easiest Foraging Ever: Autumn Olive

Ok, Salty and I have made no secret of not being fans of Autumn Olive, as it’s a massively aggressive invasive species. We wouldn’t recommend planting it, ever. But it’s already There! and There! And There, and There, and There…. Why not make good use of what’s already out there? It’s free, it’s nutritious, it’s abundant, it’s easy. October here in the midwest is the perfect time to hone your autumn olive foraging skills.

What is autumn olive?

Otherwise known as Elaeagnus umbellata, or Japanese silverberry, autumn olive is a shrubby tree that’s spreading like wildfire in the Eastern US, midwest, and Pacific northwest. It was intentionally imported, on the theory that it would make good wildlife food. It’s a very hardy, tolerant plant that makes an Abundance!! of small edible berries in the fall. 

The birds do like it, but they can’t eat a tithe of those berries, and the plant spreads like crazy through grasslands and disturbed border areas like roadsides. That’s good for the wildlife in fall, but not during the rest of the year when the berries aren’t ready and the native vegetation that would otherwise provide food’s been crowded out. (That’s why we don’t like it.)

But what’s this about Easy Foraging?

Autumn olive trees now line roadsides and are sprinkled through parks in more than half of U.S. states. Right now, the branches are simply *loaded* with easy to pick and edible berries. On my first attempt, I picked about four cups in a bit under 15 min. They stayed good for at least a week without refrigeration, too. Maybe they’d have lasted longer, but truth is … I ate ’em.

This tree was five steps from a park road. The road that led to the park had a solid hundred yards of such trees we could literally pick without leaving the truck.

Proper ID is Essential to foraging!

If you aren’t sure of what you’re picking out of the wild and eat it, you could kill yourself. That’s the fact of it. Not being a great botanist myself, I avoid hard to identify species (I’m looking at YOU, most of the mushroom world) and limit my foraging to species I can identify with confidence. Autumn olive makes my forager’s list; it’s distinctive.

For one thing, it’s called ‘silverberry’ because the undersides of the leaves have this nifty waxy layer that makes them look silvery, especially when they get to rattling in a breeze. (It also makes the trees more drought resistant.)

The berries are distributed abundantly all down the branches, and the leaves are long, slim, and silvery/whitish on the undersides.

Another distinguishing feature is that the red berries have a distinctive freckling of little white dots. The dots are similar in size to the period at the end of this sentence, if you’re reading on a full size screen. Look for the white freckles before foraging.

Little white freckles on the red berries are must be there, or you don’t have autumn olive.

Also check out the pictures to see how the leaves and berries are distributed on the limbs. It’s not a *unique* distribution, but it’s not that common either, so helps adds confidence to your identification.

Foraging right also means being aware of ‘distractors’

A distractor is a a wrong answer. There are other plants out there with little red berries, and most of them aren’t edible. 

This tree also likes the habitat autumn olive likes in our area and the trees are often side by side. They aren’t hard to tell apart if you’re paying attention and have seen both.

The photo above was taken from a tree growing ten feet from the autumn olive I was picking. Both had similar sized red berries. This distractor’s berries don’t have white freckles, and the undersides of the leaves aren’t silvery. The berries aren’t distributed nearly as evenly down the branch as autumn olive’s are, either.  There are other differences, but if you’re not into botany they don’t leap out as much. These also aren’t edible, so far as I could find out.

When is the right time for autumn olive foraging?

Oh, just spitballing here…but autumn? So I first tried picking this plant near the end of September, when the berries were light red. Color me Unimpressed. They were unpleasantly tart and astringent, though edible.

I tried again two weeks later. The berries were more red. They were also better tasting; still tart but less astringent.  Another week, another improvement; by halfway through October they were actually good.

I’d read the berries sweetened with the first frost, so I went back after our first hard frost. I didn’t notice a difference from the week before. 

Not all trees are equally worth foraging

I’ve found on any given day, two trees twenty feet apart can taste significantly different. Some trees make sweeter berries. Some ripen earlier than others. There are *lots* of autumn olive trees out there. Pick a few and taste them before you spend much time, and move on until you find a tree you like.

How to pick the berries

Not one at a time! There are billions of the little things. Picking pros have cool picking combs to speed things up, and nifty aprons to help collect. I’m low budget; I just grabbed a plastic bag and used my fingers to strip branches into the bag. It was easy and pretty efficient. Some berries missed the bag. Who cares? The tree made more than I could pick anyway.

I just strip the berries right into the bag. They’re not messy, as they don’t juice all over your fingers.

Look at multiple sources before foraging

The first foraging book I picked up emphasized that one should consult multiple sources with different pictures before foraging. I agree; it’s great advice to use multiple reliable sources whenever the information’s important. We here at 3BY do our best to provide you with good information… but that doesn’t change the wisdom of the approach. 

That means now’s a great time to learn to recognize this highly edible, abundant, easily foragable plant. Go pick yourself some free food! We plan to do another post soon on how to do the preservation and eating.