This is Magnus showing the most efficient way to harvest sea buckthorn. Well, he doesn’t exactly harvest the berries, but he only takes away the raw juice, which is good because he doesn’t harm the buckthorn shrubs:
Part 1:
Photo by Arthur Chapman.
I’m not growing sea buckthorn in my garden (yet?…), but it grows along the coast of Denmark, so it’s available for free around this time of the year, if you bother to go out and harvest the berries.
A thank you goes to Dorte for the juice recipe below! 
“Sea buckthorn juice is able to keep fresh for about 1 year when it is stored in a cold place, without a preservative, because it exists naturally in the berries. When the juice has been extracted from the berries, you can drink it as “schnapps”, since it is very “strong”. Or you can mix 600 g (21 ounces) of cane sugar per 1 l (4 cups) raw juice. The raw juice and sugar is stirred without heating up.
Juice for drinking: Mix about 1½ dl (½ cup) of the sugar mixture and 8½ dl (3½ cups) water (depending on the taste). The sugar mixture will separate, so you will have to give it a shake before mixing with water. If you don’t drink the final mixture right away you will have to stir again, since it will also separate.”
I’m still struggling with my five old apple trees in my garden. If they are left alone they grow like crazy, sending up a massive number of shoots:
They’ll quickly grow too big for my garden. Maybe if I only had one tree it would fit in the garden, but since they have always been pruned the limited area was never a problem. Last year I pruned them really hard and removed all shoots so only the bare stems were left (thicker than 5 cm / 2 inch in diameter). That resulted in not a single apple being produced. Bad idea.
So this fall I’m leaving a single shoot per stem, hoping that apples will develop on those shoots next year, where they’ll be one year old:
I guess the lesson is that apples won’t develop on wood younger than 1 year.
The ideal situation for me would be to plant an apple tree in a place with lots of space around it, and then forget about it until I would go out and collect the apples. And then let it grow according to its own genes and chop it down once it stopped producing apples.
When you start pruning hard it’s like you can’t go back to free growth without letting the tree grow into a big mess. So I have to live with the decision of the former owners and learn how to prune properly, as I don’t want to chop the trees down, since that would force me to go to the supermarket instead.
