How to Forage for Autumn Olive

If you search for “autumn olive” on the internet, you get articles from all manner of agricultural, forestry, and conservation services telling you how to eradicate it from the landscape, profiling it as an aggressive invasive exotic. It’s interesting that while there’s so much information on controlling this plant, hardly anyone talks about eating the fruit, which contains the seed—the plant’s primary means of propagation. The fruit, which happens to be one of the most universally-relished fruits (once tasted), could be a much more tempting and effective “carrot” method of motivating people to help slow the spread of the plant, rather than the “stick” method of telling people it’s bad and they should spend their free time employing the old “hack and squirt” method of removal.