I started growing goji berry plants in 2014. I used to buy a bag of dried goji berries from the health food store for about $16 for 8 oz. I was curios if I could grow them in my backyard so I wouldn't have to spend money to get this amazing super-food/ancient Chinese medicine. I also was able to find fresh goji berries and always wanted to know what they tasted like compared to their dried counterparts.

I did some research and found out a great technique to germinate them. I did not have to purchase seeds. If you go to a health food store and buy dried organic goji berries the seeds within can still germinate because they are dried slowly by the sun and not by an oven.

So probably the first instinct is to then take the seeds out of the berry and plant each one individually in a seed tray cell. That is what I did a year earlier before I learned a better method that was actually successful.

The method is to take the entire dried berry and plant one in each cell of the seed tray. In essence treat each dried berry as an individual seed. Keep the soil moist until germination. With this method it will take about a month for the plants to germinate.

Important to note that a white mold will appear in the soil and around the berry. This is good and perfectly normal.

This mold makes the seedlings more resistant to disease and stronger than if you would have taken the seeds directly for the dried berry and planted them. If you were to plant just the seeds directly into the soil it would only take 3-7 days to germinate.

Here is another reason though to plant the whole berry. The average goji berry of 30 seeds. With this method there is a near 100 percent germination rate with multiple plants per cell.

So throughout these couple of years I have some pictures of my progress with raising these plants.

So I germinated a handful of berries and transplanted them into pots when they were out growing the seed tray cells.

Here they are towards the end of the season of 2014

This what they looked like coming out of dormancy in 2015

This is when I transplanted them into the ground in February 2015

This is how they looked mid summer after growing for a few months

They even attracted this purple moth

Now (2016) some of the plants are tall as the fence

Buds forming, flowers blooming, berries growing

So after all that work the first fully mature plump goji berry

I know this is just the first of many to grow and I hope to keep you guys updated because even though it has been two years so far, this is just the beginning of this journey and hope to share what i know in written or video form. Hope this inspires others to try and grow goji. Thanks for reading!