Goji berry aka Wolfberry

Can I grow goji berries in USDA zone 6?

Goji berries can grow in zone 6. They might seem like an exotic fruit, but they are tough enough to survive freezing winters. I grew mine in pots and put them outside against the house during the winter and they were fine.

Goji berries are also called wolfberries, but I think of wolfberry as a more general name for fruits of plants from the Lycium genus and “goji” as the types that come from China: Lycium barbarum and Lycium chinense. There are native wolfberry plants, but I don't think any are known for having good fruit except maybe Lycium texanum and Lycium exsertum (Littleleaf wolfberry), but I think they are only hardy to USDA zone 8, so that's not going to work for me.

Goji plants are also called matrimony vine and grown as an ornamental plant, which is good evidence that they are a tough enough plant that anyone can grow them. It's not really a vine, just a tall bendy sort of plant, like a raspberry that can grow way taller than you want it to. It also spreads if you plant it in the ground, like raspberries, so keep that in mind.

How do they taste?

I grew my Gogi plants from seeds. Usually the seeds from shrubs and trees that don’t need cross pollination (because they can pollinated themselves) will produce fruit similar to the parent plant's fruit. My goji berries have turned out tasting pretty good. Not amazing, but good. I don’t know if the nice varieties of goji berries get much better than that. The real value of the fruits is that they are very high in nutrients and still edible.

They’ve got an initial burst of sweet juice and then an aftertaste of the seeds which is less good. I find the best way to eat them is to chew lightly, just enough to pop them and taste the juice and then swallow without breaking up the seeds and getting a lot of the seed flavor.

I’ve never tried dried goji berries, so I can’t say how they compare to the fresh berries. But I have tried juices and health drinks with goji in them and I definitely prefer the actual berries. Some of those juices are super tart, like a not-fully-ripe-raspberry tart, but my fresh goji berries aren’t tart like that at all.

How tough are Goji plants?

I mentioned that I grew my goji berries from seeds, and that alone shows how tough they are, because I’m not always good at consistently watering. I started a lot of different seeds and, with my inconsistent care, the plants that did well were goji and chamomile. I had a few other herbs and flowers growing at the same time and let’s just say they didn’t make the cut.

To prune or not to prune Goji berries.

When I was originally searching for information about goji berries what I found said that pruning was not necessary. My experience showed me otherwise.

One of my plants got a disease, and the tip of each shoot died. So it got the equivalent of a hard pruning. It survived and seems fully recovered. The other was healthy and I did not prune it at all. I got so many berries from the smaller plant and only about five berries from the taller one.

These plants have had the same conditions but they are grown from seed, so they have different genetics, so I can’t say that the dieback from the disease is directly the cause of the much higher fruit production, but it’s my best theory right now.  I will prune the other plant next spring to see if it results in better production.

So, for good yields, in early spring/late winter of its second year and while the plant is dormant (no leaves) cut it down to about 15 inches.

The End

Have you tried growing goji berries? Tell me in the comments.