The trees are a beautiful landscape plant as well. When they’re young, they grow more upright and vase shaped before spreading and rounding out into their final mature form. Kousa dogwoods can live to be over 100 years. They mature to about 30 feet tall x 30 feet wide (their width and height are roughly equal at maturity) once they reach 20-30 years old. Kousa dogwoods are considered small to medium sized trees. Kousa dogwood trees take 5-7 years before they produce flowers and fruit. How many years before Kousa dogwoods produce flowers or fruit? That means you can plant only a single tree and still get fruit production. Yes, kousa dogwoods are hermaphroditic, with both male and female parts on the bracts. (Read more about the benefits of using wood chips and mulches). To promote optimal soil moisture levels and soil fertility for your Kousa dogwoods, top-dress around the trees with 3-6″ of wood chips/mulch once or twice per year. After 3-5 years, they shouldn’t require additional irrigation if you regularly get rain. If you live in hot dry area or are experiencing a drought, you’ll want to irrigate your young Kousa dogwoods – about 1″ of water per week until they’re established. They do not like wet or waterlogged soil. Kousa dogwoods grow best in well-draining but moist acidic soil. The Tyrant picking Kousa dogwood fruit on one of the full-sun trees. It’s native to Japan, Korea, and China, and produces an edible fruit in late summer. Cournus kousa, aka Kousa dogwood or Asian dogood, is the subject of this article.Excellent for jams and pies once the seeds are strained out. We’ve never eaten them, but these are supposed to be quite good, although sour. Cornus mas, aka Cornelian cherry dogwood, is another imported landscape plant native to Eurasia that produces an edible fruit.(They’re also supposed to taste terrible, although we’ve never tried them because, well, they’re poisonous and supposed to taste bad.) Cornus florida, the dogwood species native to the Southeastern US, produces small red berries in the fall that are mildly poisonous to humans.The same applies to the fruit of dogwood trees, some of which are edible some of which are not: In this article, we’ll share everything we know about Kousa dogwoods so you can find them, grow them, and enjoy this wonderful fall fruit as well! Your Kousa dogwood questions answered Are dogwood fruits poisonous?Īs we state in our Beginner’s guide to foraging, rule #1 of foraging or eating any new food you’re unfamiliar with is: Never eat anything you’re not 100% certain you’ve correctly ID’d AND you’re not 100% certain is edible. Whatever fruit we don’t pick falls to the ground and rots, and the landscapers weed whack whatever seedlings sprout up the following year. As it turns out, nobody who frequents our Kousa dogwood spot seems to know that they’re an edible fruit - or if they do, they don’t care. Is this theft? No, unless you consider stealing fruit from squirrels, yellow jackets and other insects to be theft. We’d initially considered growing Kousa dogwoods in our food forest, but upon finding a nearby spot full of mature Kousas, we decided against it. By doing so, they freed up space in our yard for other large perennial fruit & nut-producing trees. Whoever this person or people were, we are enormously grateful to them. The first Kousa dogwood fruit of the late summer season in Greenville, South Carolina.
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