Lycium barbarum Seeds | Wolfberry Goji Berry Best Gift Man
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LATIN NAME: Lycium barbarum
COMMON NAME: Wolfberry
Plant Profile
Lycium barbarum is a scrambling shrub of the Solanaceae, one to two metres tall, with narrow grey-green leaves, small purple flowers and scarlet oblong berries about the length of a fingernail. It comes from the loess country of north-west China, where it has been cultivated around Zhongning in Ningxia for at least six hundred years.
The plant is tolerant of drought, salt and alkaline ground, and it is grown as much for stabilising poor soil as for fruit. Berries are picked from July to September, dried in the sun or by machine, and graded by size, the largest fetching several times the price of the smallest. A single mature bush carries two to three kilograms of fresh fruit in a good year, and the thorns make picking slow work.
Science & Biotechnology
The colour of the dried fruit is not beta-carotene. Zeaxanthin, mostly as the dipalmitate ester, dominates the carotenoid fraction and gives the berry its deep orange-red; that is also why goji is studied in relation to macular pigment, where a small trial showed increases in plasma zeaxanthin and in macular optical density.
The polysaccharide fraction, usually labelled LBP, has been the subject of a great deal of animal immunology with little that translates into a human dose. Betaine and a range of phenolic compounds are also present. The berry is nutritious and pleasant, but the superfood claims attached to it since the 1990s are a marketing construction rather than a finding.
Uses & Benefits
Dried berries go into soup, congee, tea and rice wine, usually fifteen to thirty grams a day. They swell and soften in hot liquid and taste of mild tomato and raisin. In Chinese medicine they are used for dry eyes, lower back weakness and cough.
Two cautions matter. Case reports link goji to a raised INR in patients on warfarin, so intake should be steady rather than occasional. The fruit also carries sulfites in some dried lots, and people with a ragweed or tobacco allergy occasionally react to the protein. The fresh fruit ferments quickly and is usually dried or frozen within a day of picking.
Growing from Seed
Seed germinates in a fortnight at 20°C with no pretreatment, and a berry squashed onto compost is enough to start a hedge. Cuttings of pencil-thick wood taken in early spring root in water within three weeks and are the faster route to fruit.
Plants crop from the second year after cuttings and prefer full sun and a neutral to alkaline soil. Prune hard in late winter to four or six canes, since fruit forms on the current season’s wood. Bird pressure is severe, and netting from July is the only reliable defence in a small garden. In alkaline soil the leaves yellow slightly, which is chlorosis rather than disease.
Our Take
A tough, generous shrub for poor ground, worth growing for the fruit and the hedge, and worth ignoring the supplement aisle for.
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