Orchard People

#050 Growing Elderberries as a Cash Crop with Terry Durham
[00:00:00] Introduction and Personal Anecdote
Susan: Hi everyone. How are you feeling today? Me, I've been struggling a little bit. It's that time of year when people are sneezing and sniffling and spreading colds and flu. First, my husband Cliff got sick. Now I'm feeling a little tired and stuffy.
It's that kind of day. So what do you do when you get sick? I have a shoebox filled with health food supplements. So when Cliff first got sick, I took it out of the kitchen cupboard to see what I had. I found a bottle of really expensive syrup that was made with elderberries, elderflowers, vitamin C and echinacea.
It actually tasted really bad, but Cliff took the stuff as instructed and finished the whole bottle, and he's feeling a bit better right now. Those types of supplements aren't cheap. I wondered why. You see, elderberry shrubs are a beautiful native plant here in North America. I had one in my garden for years and it was delightful and easy to grow, but I never turned the berries into medicine.
[00:01:10] Discovering Elderberry Benefits
Susan: So in today's show, we will learn more about elderberry plants. What selections are available? Are they always easy to grow? And how hard is it to make your own elderberry medicine?
[00:01:23] Interview with Terry Durham: Elderberry Farming
Susan: My guest today on the show is Terry Durham of River Hills Harvest in Missouri. He's an organic farmer who, in 2003, shifted from growing vegetables to growing and processing elderberries.
He uses new elderberry selections that have been developed from wild plants, and he's working to help other small scale growers grow elderberries too.
So on the line is Terry Durham. Terry, thanks for coming on the show today.
Terry: Thank you so much for having me on the show today. I've been looking forward to it since we first talked.
Susan: Oh, great. So tell me, I'm very curious, you had worked in vegetable farming. What made you consider turning to growing elderberries as a cash crop instead?
Terry: Well we grew vegetables for CSA and we worked the soil pretty hard growing vegetables, and we wanted to try to change over to a more permaculture type of agriculture in our fields.
And I had always been interested in elderberry from a very young age when my grandma used to have us go out and pick the elderberries and she would make jelly out of 'em. And my dad taught me how to make pop guns and whistles out of the stems of the elderberry. So I had a history of loving the elderberry, and we had gotten interested in it with a group of researchers from the university that were also into native plants. And they started to do some research and decided to sort to select for some new varieties. And we got involved and I could see that it was gonna be a really good future for elderberry growing 'cause there was nobody really doing it. And they grew so well here in the Midwest, the native ones did. So we shifted over from the vegetables into having 40 acres of elderberries. And that was the first big orchard. And from that we were able to start lots of other growers with the new selections that were coming out of the research.
Susan: Wow. That's a big change. Now you mentioned your background with elderberries and the jelly that you used to have.
[00:03:41] Health Benefits of Elderberries
Susan: When did you discover that elderberries are actually healthy and why are they healthy?
Terry: We knew the elderberries were healthy from early days of the herbal medicine when I first started getting into that, but we didn't, I didn't really start collecting or using them until in the end of the late nineties. I came across an elderberry concentrate product that some people in Kansas were making. Wyldewood Cellars were processing a elderberry concentrate that they were bringing in from Europe. And it was this great medicine and people were starting to use it.
And soon as I saw it, it all came together for me. And they're importing this native plant from Europe that we could be growing in every one of our gardens. And it grew wild everywhere, but it just hadn't been worked with and selected for the very best ones. For instance, Go ahead. So that selection process started in 1997, and that's when we put our first rows out, but then we waited for the trials on all the new selections to come out before we started to plant our fields. And that took about eight years of trialing them all to come up with just the right ones to plant out there.
Susan: So when I went out to and or when I found that elderberry syrup in my little box in the kitchen, would that be made from North American elderberries or European elderberries?
And would that come from Europe or would it have been grown in North America?
Terry: I would probably say that it came from Europe because 95% of the products that we consume in the United States are made from the. European elderberry. The Sambucus nigra, which is a different plant than the American, which we grow, is the Sambucus canadensis, which is our North American variety that grows from the Rocky Mountains to the east, from Maine to Florida.
And so it's widely dispersed. So if people had not been making hardly any products for a long time out of the American stuff, and now we're just beginning. So if it was American, you'd have been really lucky. But there's, but the American elderberry is a little bit better elderberry we feel, than the European.
Susan: So if it's a totally different plant, then do we know that it also has medicinal benefits?
Terry: That's why we have been working at the University of Missouri. They've been doing research to show how much of the medicinal benefits that the American elderberry have, and they're very high in all the antioxidants, a little higher than the European, but they also include two additional antioxidants that are really helpful also and keep it fresh.
So We started out with a lot of science. I like to make decisions, science based. And then, from that we've learned how healthy they are, and how easily we can produce 'em here in the United States. And now we have hundreds of orchards around the country that're all growing elderberries, and they're getting them into their communities and they're making products, and they're making their own medicines and enjoying them in muffins and lots of other good things.
Susan: Oh, fantastic. Okay.
[00:07:17] Growing and Caring for Elderberries
Susan: We have quite a few questions here. So we've got Derek from Helena, Montana. What are the minimum water requirements for elderberries and are they different between the black and blue types? Second question is on the availability of improved varieties.
Terry: The first question, there are two.
The main elderberry that would be growing in that area that would be wild would be the blue cerulea type elderberry. It's considered, it's called the blue elderberry. It's lighter in color. They're just beginning to do a lot of the research in California now that we've been doing on the canadensis type, which grows wild on our area here, on this side of the mountains.
So it is used for some juice, I don't know, but we don't know how much antioxidant it has in it. We know it has some, they're beginning to do that testing, and then they're encouraging people to grow for the flowers, which is another whole crop or herb that can be collected from the elderberry. And they're talking about using it in fence rows for habitat, for the insects, as well as to collect the flowers.
Now we like to give our plants quite a bit of water. Elderberries can, they will live with less water, but we try to give ours at least an inch a week, and that keeps 'em growing really well. And if you're gonna try to grow berries, water's really important because they're mostly water when they get ripe.
So for us, it's August when we are harvesting the elderberries and it's dry and really hot. So without that water, they can quickly lose their size and not get big and juicy.
The second question was new selections.
We have a nursery where we send out the new selections that we've been working with. There are a number of other orchards around that are beginning to carry the new selections. We really think they're superior for the Midwest, and we have helped the growers all over United States grow, and Canada begin to grow these new selections and they seem to be vigorous almost everywhere. And so they are high in antioxidant and then they have some other characteristics that really help the growers manage 'em.
Susan: Wow. Okay, great. Now we have, a big, beautiful question from Rich near Fredericksburg, VA, Virginia. I have several questions, says, Rich. Sorry, did I say Rick? Rich? I have several questions. Feel free to pick and choose which ones to respond to. Wow, he has so many great questions. I wanna go through all of them, but let me just pick one for now and then we'll come back to it. Let's see. A lot of it is on varieties.
He asks here about the care and, in terms of pruning, how much hands-on care do these plants need? He asks which varieties work well to mow off either every year or every other year, and which ones need to be selectively pruned to remove old wood. So can you talk a little bit about how much care these plants actually need?
They are native plants, so can we just leave them alone and let them do their thing?
Terry: You can leave them alone and let them do their thing, but they can get outta control. And one of the nice things about the American elderberry compared to the European elderberry is that it fruits on 1-year-old wood.
So we pretty much always cut all of our canes down to the ground every winter, and that grows primocanes. We want that 1-year-old wood that will shoot up and make a really large head at the very end. So that's one of the key parts of our system is that by pruning them to the ground, you synchronize the growing and the blooming, and then the fruiting, so that we get it in a more concentrated time period so we can pick it and harvest it and get it out of there quick.
And so most of the ones that we sell all are proven to be good for stooling or coming back up and growing really fast and making big heads on the top. Some that don't work would be the European types. They have to be selectively pruned, so you have to go in there and cut off the 4-year-old wood and then the damaged wood, because you're always managing your 1-year-old wood to be the ones that will produce fruit for the next year.
So that's a lot of hand pruning to try to manage all that. And then it, they don't have a very synchronized set of fruit, so they have to be picked over a longer period of time. Most of the canadensis can handle the pruning down. Some that don't. Johns doesn't seem to be able to take it, but and that's one of the ones that's from Canada that people do grow up there. It's a very tall plant, but it doesn't stool well and it, doesn't seem to fit into that system.
Susan: Interesting. Okay. So basically if you choose the right, and you call them selections, if you choose the right selection or type of plant, we call them in with fruit trees, varieties. I know that's a little different, but if you choose the right one, you can just mow it to the ground.
When would you do that? In the fall, every year?
Terry: We do it in the winter when a tree is totally dormant and lost all of its leaves. We usually start pruning in January.
Susan: So you don't even need any specialist knowledge. You just cut 'em to the ground, let them come back every year. Now that is definitely easier than learning how to prune, and which branches do you remove, which do you keep. Do you people like that because it seems easy, or?
Terry: It's very easy to grow elderberries. They can actually be like a raspberry, they can just take over if you give them a chance. And so you gotta keep 'em pruned in place of where you want them to grow at, and a few people I know will leave a small stump up, maybe six inches that they continue to have new canes come out of that.
They're usually growing with a fabric row cover of some type to keep the weeds down around them.
Susan: That's good. Okay, let's keep this question. If we have time later, we're gonna come back 'cause there's so many good questions here.
I wanna go to Ken's email.
[00:14:31] Elderberry Uses and Safety
Susan: Hi Susan. Fantastic topic. A silly question for Terry. He mentioned some things made from elderberry plants such as pop guns, et cetera. Did he ever hear of elderberry smoking pipes? I hear that they are awesome from a pipe smoker in Toronto. Thanks. That's Ken in Toronto.
Terry: I have seen people using the stems for the pipe stems, using the stems for the stems, but not too much.
The biggest history is probably in flute making. There's some beautiful elderberry flutes even in the Smithsonian that were collected hundreds of years ago by the Native Americans that they were using. They make fire tubes. They used to use the hollowed out pith, any section between where the buds come out, there's a pith in the middle of the elderberry and you can push it out with a stick.
People do it different ways, and then you have a nice tube, and then that tube is like a tool and it can be used for blow on a fire or to make whistles out of, or flutes, or lots of different things have been done with them.
Susan: What an unusual, interesting plant in that way. We have another question here, and I'm glad Cindy asked this.
Cindy writes from St. Catherine's, Ontario. Hello, Susan. Loved the show. My question today is, are Elderberries safe for children and pets? Thank you for your answer. I'm really glad Cindy asked that because I have a memory of when we had our elderberry shrub in the backyard, I remember somebody telling me, oh, you don't want to eat those berries fresh because they can be toxic.
So is that true?
Terry: Depending on what berry you have growing. Now, that's one of the great things that we've worked on, and the University of Missouri has completed research on this precursor of cyanide that's in most of the Sambucus. Some kinds of Sambucus have a lot more than others. The nigra from Europe is one that does have quite a bit of the precursor of cyanide in it.
And when we eat it, our digestive system turns it into a cyanide and it can cause problems. So the European elderberry needs to be processed and heated before you eat it, or it can give you an upset stomach. Now after six years of research, the biochemists have assured us and they were waiting for this to be published that the American elderberry has 100 times less potential of cyanide than apple juice. So we don't need to worry about the cyanide issue in American elderberry, but most of the stuff that you would buy dried elderberries or things, unless you know where it's sourced from, you still have to be careful.
So that's why it's so good to buy your own, to grow your own elderberries, and then you know for sure they are good American elderberries and that we don't have to worry about that.
Susan: Oh, great.
Terry: So we used to always be really careful till we had the research to prove that we don't really have to worry about that in the American elderberries.
But the distinction is not being made a lot of times between the canadensis and the nigra when you're buying them. So you gotta make sure which kind you're gonna get good American elderberry. You don't have to worry about the cyanide issue.
Susan: That's good news.
[00:18:16] Harvesting and Processing Elderberries
Susan: Okay, so we've got an email from Suzy in Minnesota.
Just as a little preface, we've talked about how these plants are relatively easy to grow. We've said that they've had medicinal benefits. And I mentioned that I had an elderberry bush in my garden. It was a canadensis, I'm pretty sure. But I remember one of the reasons I didn't harvest the berries is it was fussy.
There are these beautiful berries, what are you gonna do? Pick one off, one at a time? And Suzy in Minnesota writes, what's the best way to remove the berries from the stems? And I totally understand that question. I think it's a great question. So what would you answer to Suzy?
Terry: There are two main approaches to destemming the elderberries.
A lot of people will pick the big bunches, the umbrels of berries, and freeze them on a stem. And then, they come off the stem really easy. So you can put 'em in a big bag, put your big frozen heads of elderberries fresh into the bag and freeze it. Don't push 'em down real tight. Leave them kind of airy.
And after they're frozen, just beat the bag around a little bit and most all those berries will fall off. And you can make a little hole in the corner of the sack. And most of those berries will come right out of there and leave the stems in the bag. But the problem with that way is it always leaves this little bitty quarter to three eighths inch piece of stem on the berries 'cause when they freeze, there's a little intersection that breaks there. But that was the easiest way in the past to do it.
We try to do all of our berries fresh before they're frozen, and we have a machine that the farmers use that will stem the berries like that. It's one of the things that makes it successful for the small growers is to be able to do that, but it's pretty simple to do yourself if you can find some stainless wire screening, like hardware cloth. That's about a quarter to three eighths inch size holes. And if you make a little wooden frame and you attach that to the bottom, you can put those berries in there when they're fresh and rub them back and forth gently, and they'll get caught in there and they'll fall off really easily.
Susan: Oh, wow.
Terry: And then the advantage of doing this with the fresh berries then is in the washing and the cleaning that can come next if you put 'em into a colander, and then you have some water in your sink that doesn't go over the top of the colander, and you only fill the colander about half full of berries, and you put that in the water, the ripe berries will go to the bottom of your colander and the debris and unripe berries and green berries will float to the top, and then you can skim those off, and then you can get all those really good clean berries from the bottom.
After you've skimmed that off, strain out, and then you have a really nice clean berry that way, it's like making a chicken soup and then you can put those in the freezer and freeze those up and then you're ready to make juice.
Susan: Yeah, that's great. It's like I was saying, it's like making a chicken soup where you take the, sort of scummy stuff off the top that floats up, and then you've got the great broth, so it's similar.
[00:21:42] Making Elderberry Medicine
Susan: I also wanted to ask. You have your berries, they're ready to go. How do you turn them into medicine after that?
Terry: Now you've washed those berries and they're, fresh and then you've frozen them. Because I always like to start, most of the things I make, with frozen berries, because when you bring them out of the freezer, you put 'em in a pan, put 'em on the stove, and just put a little bit of water in there, just enough to start making a little bit of steam, maybe a half a cup, and then as those berries thaw since they were frozen. And when they freeze, it breaks all the cell walls in that berry and the juice will just run out of those little bitty berries as they thaw up. So once the juice will accumulate in there, you don't wanna boil it, you just heating up it enough to thaw it out and it'll just fill with juice where the berries are.
And then I just take that juice, pour it through a jelly bag, one of those little three legged strainers that you use for making jelly. It's just a muslin bag that fits in there. And so you're gonna strain that juice out from the berries and most all the juice will come right out of it. You can just push a little bit on it with a spoon or something and get the last out.
But then you have your elderberry juice. That is the pure good medicine right there, that's so healthy. And so to preserve that, to keep it, you can do it in a few different ways. You can put that right in an ice cube tray and just freeze those little things. And you can just take one little cube out at a time, put it in your tea, or let it thaw out and drink that for medicine.
Or you can hot pack it. We have been hot packing the juice for a long time and have never had any problems, and we have in an FDA's approved process that's. Like a hot pack that we've done a million jars with and never had a problem. So it's really simple to do at home. So you take your juice, you heat it up to 180 degrees.
You don't want to go over 180 degrees because above that temperature you begin to lose the antioxidants. And I see way too many people boiling it. But if it's the European type, you have to boil it. The Americans don't have to boil it. 180 degrees will keep all those great medicines and antioxidants and stuff in it.
Then you're gonna put that into some hot glass. You'll have your jars that you want to put it in, put them in the oven at the lowest temperature, like 170 degrees. So you pour your 180 degree juice into the 170 degree glass bottles and put a cap on it and it will stay in there for a really long time.
I have stuff that's 15 years old that's still good.
Susan: Wow. Incredible. And so this, when we're talking about the juices and medicine, you talk about taking out little cubes from the freezer of the juice. Would you only take it when you don't feel well? Or is it a preventative thing that you really, you should have a cube every day?
Terry: If you don't want to get the flu. You wanna protect yourself from the viruses that are everywhere. One tablespoon a day is all it really takes to get rid of the viruses that you have in your body. It reduces inflammation, it gets rid of the free radicals that are in our body.
If you wait and get sick, then you can take it and it will reduce the time that you have the flu to just a few days. And it begins to give you relief really quick. When you drink the pure juice, then you wanna do about three or four times a day, take one tablespoon, maybe a little bit more if you're sick, and it will make you feel much better.
But it's really better if you're doing it a little bit every day, especially during the winter and the flu season, because it will keep you from getting the flu. And it does a lot of other really great things for us too, besides just protecting us from the flu.
Susan: Fantastic. How about this. There are lots more questions that we'll go through, and I'd love to talk in more detail about the different elderberry selections. We talked about one called John. There are lots of other ones and new ones as well.
[00:26:02] Elderberry Plant Selections
Susan: So Terry, before we jump into elderberry plant selections, we've got an email here from Jason and Jason writes his, the title is How Big.
So Jason writes, hi, fantastic show. I hear that elderberry bushes get large. Very large. How big do they actually get? I'm not sure if I would have room to grow them. And Jason's from Las Vegas.
[00:26:31] Managing Elderberry Growth
Terry: It depends on how much you cut 'em. The ones that we grow commercially that we cut every year, rarely get more than eight feet tall.
And then we will cut that off and it will regrow every year. But they will spread. So you can always mow them down where they're trying to grow in other places, but they usually not much more than 10 feet, but it will get as wide and as many chutes as you will let them once they get started. So it can be a little bit invasive, so you have to be able to contain them and then you can manage the size of how big you want it. 'Cause they're so easy to grow. They'll spread and fill any space that you would like them to be in.
Susan: I'm glad that he asked the question then, because if you've got a teeny tiny little garden and you're also hoping to grow some flowers and other things, perhaps elderberries aren't the right choice.
Terry: Put 'em in the corner of the yard, or in a little fence row or on the edge so that you can contain them back in there.
Susan: Okay. Fight them back. We've got an email from Denise. Hello. Very interesting radio show topic. She says, I'm not really sure what elderberry are. I have heard a lot about them regarding health benefits and syrups, tonics, et cetera.
[00:27:51] Health Benefits of Elderberries
Susan: Can you please embellish on the health benefits listening to you in Alma, Quebec?
Terry: The University of Missouri has been doing a lot of current research over the last, oh, five or six years. They have published over 50 new articles on elderberry, so there's a lot of new science coming out. So there's the cyanide issue that we just talked about, that's one of the projects for the growing part 'cause we're doing work with the growing there as well as the health benefits. So we know that it's super strong with anything antiviral. It's a very strong antiviral. The elderberry molecule will attach onto the virus and it can't replicate, then it can remove it from the system.
They've identified how that works better.
[00:28:45] Research on Elderberries
Terry: But they're doing a lot of exciting work now with Alzheimer's, prostate cancer, and stroke recovery. Those are the three big projects they're working on now. But elderberry has been used for thousands of years for medicine. Hippocrates wrote the first book on it and he felt he could heal any part of your body with a part of the elder, and he used all the different parts for different things.
So one of the reasons that it probably worked so well for everything was that it's such a strong anti-inflammatory, and so it really helps with any kind of inflammation that you have and life gives you inflammation. Everything can be inflaming these days. Different foods or stress or a lot of different things can cause inflammation.
So it really helps with that. So then it helps with almost any kind of problem that you have. 'cause it reduces that inflammation.
Susan: Interesting. a magical plant in that way.
Terry: So one of the most exciting things they're working with now is the Alzheimer's, where they have been doing human trials using our juice and they have reversed cognitive degeneration in Alzheimer's patients.
And they have done two replications of that trial now with humans and have incredible success with it. And so they continue to work on that. They have to prove it more times before they put out too much on it, but it's all moving along really good.
And they've worked on prostate cancer where they've cured prostate cancer in mice and now they're working on other models.
Research can be really slow when it comes to health sciences, especially when you're working with native plants and stuff.
Susan: That's, that sounds fantastic. that's very exciting.
[00:30:37] Growing Conditions and Pollination
Susan: let's move on to Frank's question here, Frank. His question is entitled, hi. Hello, I have grown several elderberry bushes.
I only have elderberries on a couple of them. I've planted them in mostly sunny areas throughout the day. Could something be amiss in my soil? Not sure what to look for. Thank you. Oh, and I live in Oakland, California. So that's Frank's question.
Terry: Not knowing what you have planted, it's hard to give advice 'cause there's so many different kinds of elderberries.
And in Southern California there's a small elderberry, it's what we call a Mexican dwarf that's grows all over Southern California around the irrigation canals especially. And it's a protected species because it's the home for an endangered insect. The elderberry longhorn beetle. So I don't know much about one.
They don't get a lot of fruit, I don't believe, smaller heads and stuff. So I wouldn't know if he had nigra 'cause we don't know that the canadensis and the nigra really don't pollinate each other. They're different. Some of the ornamental types aren't meant to make very much fruit.
But sun is very important if you want to get a lot of berries. They will bloom in shadier areas, but without the sun, they don't produce as much energy. They just don't make as much fruit. They like to have full sun.
Susan: So it would be great if he writes us back and if he knows what exactly, what selection he has, maybe we can answer the question more specifically.
Terry: We could answer a little bit. The canadensis, unlike the nigra, doesn't really have to have more than one selection for pollination. They're pretty much self pollinating and insect pollinated, so most of the information in the past is all based on the nigra, which is different and it needs to have a pollinator with it.
So that's why they always say to plant two when really that's European types, you need to have two more of to get 'em to pollinate properly.
Susan: Oh, so it's even easier to the American. So that's super easy. You don't need two plants in order to get the berries. So that's fantastic.
Terry: And I know, and you'll read it in many catalogs and all over that you need two, but not if they're American.
[00:33:21] Elderberry Varieties and Their Uses
Susan: I've got a quick email here from Hannah and then I wanna dig into some different selections, names of different selections you grow. But first, Hannah asks, hello, love the topic today. Can you please explain the different colors of elderberries? I was told some colors of elderberries can be hazardous to humans and even kill them.
Is that true? Thanks. And that she's Hannah's from Raleigh, North Carolina. So a quick answer to that.
Terry: There are a number of kinds of elderberries and they have different ones. We've talked about the blue elderberry, which has a potential of making people sick. The red elderberry, which grows mostly in the northwest, also it seems, and in California, it has quite a bit of toxins in it, so we don't really want to eat that one unless you're boiling it quite a bit.
There are also white elderberries and yellow elderberries in other parts of the world. But mainly if you stick with the dark purple elderberry, it's generally gonna be the one that we know is pretty safe.
Susan: Oh, okay.
Terry: Especially around North Carolina. They grow really good there.
Susan: Excellent. Okay, so we talked a little bit about different selections.
Now you mentioned John as a selection. Now we had a comment previously, I think it was from Derek. Derek said he thought John didn't taste very good. The berries didn't taste very good.
Terry: See, the Johns comes out of the research from Canada where they were in the fifties and they started working on dye industry.
Elderberry was used more for a food coloring than anything else 'cause European Union countries could not use artificial food coloring like we do here in the United States. So that spurred a group of people in Canada in the fifties to try to develop a dye industry using elderberries. And so they had a release program in the fifties where they brought out several that were meant to be these ones that would grow good in Canada that would make excellent food coloring.
And Johns was one of the really good ones that comes out of that work. And then also Kent, Nova, Scotia and Victoria, that was the little series of five that they put out. And they all make pretty good fruit and they're very large berries. They were meant mostly for the dark pigment color, but they don't have very big heads compared to the more southern varieties.
Now, see, in the other selections that we had before the 97 beginning point of the selection process were the Adams one and two, and York. Those came out of a program in New York where those came out, and that was back in the twenties. And then York was a cross between an old one called Easy Off and Adams, and it came out in the early sixties, and that was the last release of any elderberries in the United States.
And these are all selected. They have not been intentionally bred. They were just found. And then, they were brought out. So the new selections that we work with. We still grow the Adams. We love the old heirloom Adams. Adams Two is really what we grow. We haven't been able to really find Adams One. The DNA shows they're all pretty much Adams Two that we've been able to test. It isn't what we consider an indeterminate elderberry. We really haven't talked about this fact yet, that the American elderberries are determinate and indeterminate just like tomatoes. Some will produce their crop in a concentrated set pretty much all at one time, and they don't grow and reflow, and in some types, including the Adams, are indeterminate and they're going to bloom, set some fruit, grow a little more, bloom again, set some fruit, and they can do that up to four times during the season.
So they have a long picking season and even when we cut them to the ground and try to synchronize them, you have to pick them about four or five times.
[00:38:03] Commercial Elderberry Cultivation
Terry: The two new ones that we work with that we really love are determinate types. When we cut them to the ground, they come up, they make great big heads on the end of the stem, and we can usually harvest the entire crop in about a week off of the individual plants.
Susan: And what are those selections called?
Terry: So then we can have a block of Bob Gordon and a block of Ranch, and those are the two that we grow commercially, that we like to pair together. The Bob Gordon was the second one to be released from the improvement program. And it's the sweetest, it has the highest brix of any of the elderberries that we've been working with, and it has large berries of great big heads.
When you cut them to the ground, the heads will average over a quarter of a pound each when we pick them. And I have seen individual clumps up to two pounds on a Bob Gordon. Huge clumps of berries. And you pick those all at once and put 'em in the buckets. So it's pretty easy to harvest those large heads.
And they're all up right on the very ends of the shoots and they run around. The Bob Gordon usually runs about six foot tall, and the way that we work them, they can get up to eight also. And it's got really good chemistry for making wine. And some of our wine growers are beginning to make varietal wines out of the Bob Gordon.
And the Bob Gordon also has a really good characteristic that we like. It has recumbent positioning of the fruit. It turns, most elder, the berries have a big umbrella, like an umbrella of fruit. It's like a big landing pad for the birds. the Bob Gordon likes to turn its fruit upside down when it gets ripe and hangs it in a upside down position.
And it's much harder for the birds to get in there and eat those than it is when it's a upright position where it's like a landing pad for 'em. And the other one we match with that is the Ranch. Ranch elderberry is our earliest selection.
It comes on and blooms first. It's a real rugged plant. It's a little stockier. It takes clay, soil and heat a little bit better than the Bob Gordon. And it's very determinate also. So we will harvest our Ranch first, and about the time we finish it, then the Bob Gordon will start. So we have good labor management and you can move through the orchards that way.
Susan: Sorry to interrupt you, Terry.
Before we dive back in, you were telling us some great stuff about the different selections that you grow. We only have about seven minutes left on the show, so I really wanna make sure we get in.
We've got an email here from Steven. This is Steve from Crofton, Maryland. Are there any plants that are good complimentary plants to grow in or around elderberry bushes? Also, if you keep bees, do elderberry flowers produce tasty honey. Thanks.
[00:41:21] Elderberry Companion Plants and Pollinators
Terry: We are still trying to learn more about the right guild plants to grow underneath the elderberries.
We've tried some comfrey and we usually let a few different native herbs and stuff grow in our plants. You can grow elderberries around walnut trees. They are very tolerant of the black walnuts. And, so we're still trying to learn which are the very best plants to grow around the elderberry.
We grow grass and legumes between our aisles.
And the second part of that question, oh, let's go back the second part of the piece about honeybee bees. Oh, yes. Oh, about honeybee. Okay. Elderberry makes really beautiful flowers on the top that don't have very much nectar, but they have a lot of pollen.
And a lot of the bees go mostly for the pollen from the elderflowers. Also on the outside of its bark makes external nectar that feeds many of the little parasitoids and wasps and other kinds of native pollinators that need pure energy. They go up there and take it directly off the little nectar producing nodes on the outside of the bark.
We've accounted 67 different native pollinators that utilize the elderberry as a food source.
Susan: That is incredible. That's wonderful. So it's a good plant to have in your garden for biodiversity.
[00:43:03] Propagation and Purchasing Elderberries
Susan: John writes from Abbotsford, British Columbia. Can you grow elderberries from seeds or are they just plants? Do garden stores sell them to plant or just to specialty farmers and growers?
Terry: Well, if you grow from seeds, it's like growing apples from seeds. You never know what you're gonna get, and you might get a really good one. You might get one that's not very good. You don't know that they would be inconsistent from seeds, just like trying to grow apple trees from apple seeds. So we usually want people to buy known plants that have a history, and then you know what you're getting.
If you're gonna put the effort into growing a fruit tree or a bush, you wanna make sure you're growing the right thing, the one that's gonna be good for your environment, and it's gonna give you really good high quality fruit. And elderberries we think are best from hardwood cuttings or from trees that people have started and from nurseries 'cause it's always important to get planting stock from nurseries and 'cause there are a few viruses that can be in elderberry can get passed around in that stock if you're not careful.
Susan: I do have on my website, orchard people.com If, people wanna go and they just search orchard people.com, fruit tree nursery resource list. And I have a list of fruit tree nurseries across North America. So that may be a really great place to order to pick one of these great specialist nurseries in order your elderberry plant.
We have one question here. I think it's the last question for today from Jane. Hi. I just tuned in from Queens, New York City. I'm not sure if this question was asked as of yet, but here goes. I wanna try to grow elderberries due to their medicinal purposes, but I'm not sure if the weather would be right for the plants here in New York City.
Can you enlighten me on this? Thank you.
Terry: I am sure if you give them some good soil and the water, they'll grow well in New York City, New York has a lot of elderberries that grow wild all over it, and so I'm sure that they would grow there. And they're very easy to start. You can order the hardwood cuttings during the winter, which is, we're getting to be that time, and you can plant those hardwood cuttings directly in your garden. Or you can start 'em up in pots and then plant out those plants later on in the year. But you can plant the hardwood cuttings when they're dormant into cold soil and when the soil warms up, they'll root and take right off. It's pretty easy.
Susan: That's great. I'm gonna sneak in one more question. Suzy in Minnesota wrote us a bunch of fantastic questions. It's been such a quick show that I haven't been able to ask a lot of them, but here's a neat question from her. Will slightly immature elderberries ripen after they are picked?
Terry: No. We have not had any luck with the ripening of unripe fruit.
Susan: Okay, good to know.
Terry: So try to let them get ripe on the bush. If you pick them and there's still some green, they will not turn purple. You can make them into capers. We do green elderberry capers that are delicious.
Susan: Okay.
[00:46:44] Marketing and Community Benefits
Susan: And Suzy also writes, How would a backyard grower market elderberries? Would it be best to freeze them raw?
And what would be a reasonable price per pound? Let's, actually, this would be a great opportunity. You've got about two minutes, but could you tell us just quickly how you work with, growers, small scale growers, and how you can help them? and if there's a website link that you can share.
Terry: We're trying to get more and more people to grow elderberries because it's the perfect medicine to have in your backyard.
It's easy to grow all over the United States. It'll grow in every state, and it's. it's a great medicine and it's a great food, and it doesn't take that much. One big bush can make quite a bit of medicine and you can add so much value to it by making it into syrup or into jelly, and then you have that to trade with your friends or to give away or to keep yourself healthy over the winter.
And so we work with growers all over the country. We're always trying to find people that want to grow them commercially because that's where we need more farmers grow in the elderberries, doesn't take very much land. We have conferences that we put on for elderberry growers. We do mentoring workshops and we would love to see more all over the country because it's great for every community.
They're great for the environment to grow, for the native pollinators. They eat them and they're good for people to have that good healthy juice. And we just love elderberries and think everybody should have some growing in their garden.
[00:48:18] Conclusion and Resources
Susan: I feel like we could have talked about this for two hours and still not gotten around to answer all the questions, but I feel like we learned a lot.
So thank you so much, Terry, for coming on the show today.
Terry: Thank you very much and there's lots of information on our website online. If people want to go there, they can answer a lot of their questions by just looking through there.
Susan: And the website address is?
Terry: Riverhillsharvest.com.
Susan: Great. Thank you and goodbye for now.
Terry: Thank you very much. You have a wonderful day everyone.
Susan: Thanks. That was Terry Durham of River Hills Harvest.