What it is
Agarita (Mahonia trifoliolata) is in the Berberidaceae family. A spiny native evergreen with tart red berries for jelly - beat the bush over a sheet to harvest them.
How to grow it
It wants full sun to part shade, water it very low, and give it lean, rocky soil. Target a soil pH around 6.5-8.0. Space plants about 4 ft apart. Expect roughly Berries late spring. Hardy native shrub.
How it's used
Agarita is used: jelly, wine.
🔎 How to identify it
- Holly-like blue-green spiny leaflets
- Yellow fragrant flowers
- Bright red tart berries
Edibility
How to grow & propagate agarita
Everything I've worked out about starting this one, keeping it alive through a Texas year, and turning one plant into many — free.
How to propagate agarita
Agarita is best started from a cutting or nursery stock rather than seed, so the fruit comes true to the parent. Seed from fruit trees tends to revert to something wilder.
Growing agarita in Texas
Give it full sun to part shade and lean, rocky soil. Match the spot to the plant and most of the battle is already won.
Time your planting to our long warm season and watch the frost dates at both ends; the live weather tool on this site is built for exactly that.
Once it's rooted in, this is a low-water plant — overwatering does more harm than drought here. Water deeply to establish, then back off and let it prove how tough it is.
Harvesting
Figure on roughly berries late spring before you're harvesting. Let fruit ripen on the plant where you can — it's where the sugars finish — and pick gently to avoid bruising what you don't eat right away. The part you're after: ripe berries.
Making more for free
Every seed we sell is open-pollinated, which means you can save your own from the best plants and it'll grow true next year. Let a few of your strongest plants finish and go to seed, dry it fully, and store it cool and dark. That's the whole point of heirlooms — buy once, grow forever.
Before you forage it
A safety note, because this one grows wild: positive identification comes before anything goes in your mouth or your medicine. Confirm it on several features — leaf, stem, flower, smell — not a single resemblance, check the lookalike warnings, and never forage from roadsides or sprayed ground. When in doubt, leave it out.
Part of the free Texas Roots plant database, compiled by Jordan Polasek from his greenhouse in El Campo, Texas. Free to read and share. If it helped, the best thanks is to grow something.