Sea Buckthorn

Plant a male: no male, no berries, ever

Sea buckthorn carries male and female flowers on entirely separate plants, so set at least one male for every 6 to 8 females when you plant the block, and put the male on the upwind side. Commercial orchards run 7 to 12 percent of the planting as males. You cannot tell sex from a seedling, so buy named, sexed nursery stock rather than seed. The flowers are pollinated by wind and gravity alone and attract no insects, so pollen has to physically blow from a male onto a female. A female with no male in the planting will flower every spring and set nothing.

Water through dry summers despite the drought reputation

Sea buckthorn wants the equivalent of 16 to 24 inches of annual precipitation. In a drier region or a dry summer, irrigate through the establishment years; on sites that reliably get that much rain, supplemental irrigation is usually unnecessary. Its deep, suckering root system earns it a drought-hardy reputation, but the plant does not actually tolerate sustained dry conditions and yields fall off on moisture-short sites.

Skip the nitrogen: this shrub makes its own

Do not apply nitrogen fertilizer to sea buckthorn. If a soil test shows phosphorus is genuinely low, phosphorus is the one nutrient the plant does respond to; otherwise feed it nothing and let it be. Sea buckthorn fixes its own atmospheric nitrogen through root nodules, and applied nitrogen can adversely affect that nodulation, so a nitrogen feed can leave the plant worse off than no feed at all.

Dormant pruning: hold the shrub to about six feet

While the plant is leafless and dormant, cut it back to roughly six feet and open the center so light reaches the interior. Remove the dead lower branches that the shrub sheds on its own as it fills in. Left alone, sea buckthorn shades out its own lower wood and the bottom branches die, pushing the fruit up out of reach. Holding the plant near six feet improves light penetration and makes an already brutal harvest possible.

⚠ The shrub produces long, extremely sharp spines that make a mature hedge nearly impenetrable. Wear leather gauntlets and eye protection before reaching into the canopy.

Scout for Japanese beetle on the summer foliage

Walk the planting through summer and check the upper foliage for skeletonized leaves and clustered adult beetles. Hand-pick or knock beetles into soapy water in the morning while they are sluggish. Also look for aphids, mites, and green fruitworm on new growth. Sea buckthorn is very resistant to pests overall, but adult Japanese beetles actively prefer it and will work an isolated planting hard because there is little else competing for their attention.

Watch young plants for Verticillium wilt

Check young plants for branches that wilt, yellow, and die back while the rest of the shrub looks fine. Pull and destroy plants that collapse, and do not replant sea buckthorn into that spot. Before planting a new block, find out whether the ground has a history of Verticillium wilt, and if it does, plant somewhere else. Verticillium dahliae is the wilt that actually kills sea buckthorn: it has caused mortality of young trees where the shrub was planted into soil with a history of the disease. Fusarium species are also recorded on the crop as damping-off and wilt agents. These fungi live in the soil for years, so site selection is the control, not a rescue treatment.

⚠ There is no effective fungicide rescue for an established soil-borne wilt. Remove and destroy affected plants rather than spraying.

Harvest by cutting fruiting branches and freezing them

When the berries color up, cut whole fruiting branches, freeze them solid, then knock or strip the berries off while frozen. Ripening runs anywhere from July into November depending on cultivar and site, so go by berry color, not by the calendar. Sea buckthorn berries have no abscission layer, so they never loosen from the twig and simply burst when you pull on them. Freezing makes them brittle enough to shake free intact, which is why hand-picking runs on the order of 600 hours per acre and branch-cutting does not.

⚠ Cutting fruiting branches removes next year's bearing wood and reduces the following season's yield. Alternate the harvest, taking branches from a given plant only every other year.