Elderberries

I recently read the absolutely fab­u­lous book, We Took to the Woods by Louise Dick­in­son Rich. Orig­i­nally pub­lished in 1942, the book chron­i­cles the day-to-day life of a fam­ily liv­ing in Maine iso­lated from the out­side world, with the excep­tion of the Sears mail order cat­a­log. One of my favorite reflec­tions in the book is about how the author would canoe through a net­work of placid lakes sur­rounded by lush for­est to a large patch of wild rasp­berry bushes. What could be bet­ter than organic, beau­ti­ful, fresh rasp­ber­ries? Organic, beau­ti­ful, fresh, and free rasp­ber­ries of course. After read­ing this pas­sage in the book I began to wonder—certainly there is some native, wild fruit that I am sim­ply ignor­ing? I know some peo­ple have wild rasp­berry bushes. Much to my mother’s dis­may I used to pick from one as a child (I only made this mis­take of telling her once). But find­ing one involves trekking through dense brush and if you are lucky enough to find one, you must deal with the thorns of the bush.

But I did remem­ber iden­ti­fy­ing an elder­berry bush a few years ago, I had iden­ti­fied it because I was actu­ally try­ing to kill it. Luck­ily the native elder­berry won out and the Annabelle Hydrangea I wanted in its spot was moved. So, inspired by the spirit of this author in the 1940s, I decided to embrace what­ever wild fruit I had. First, I did some exten­sive read­ing and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of my elder­berry bush to assure that it was indeed an edi­ble fruit. Upon research I real­ized I actu­ally was some­what famil­iar with this native fruit. Elder­berry — Sam­bu­cus canaden­sis, right away when I saw sam­bu­cus I remem­bered the Ital­ian liqueur sam­buca. Fla­vored with elder­ber­ries, sam­buca has a very unique and tart taste. So I sup­pose elder­ber­ries were not total aliens to my palette. Accord­ing to Okla­homa State Uni­ver­sity Fact Sheet HLA– 6256–2, “Elder­ber­ries are native to many parts of North Amer­ica. The fruit of this lesser known crop is often har­vested from the wild and has a vari­ety of uses, such as mak­ing jams, jel­lies, pies, juice and wine. Elder­ber­ries have sig­nif­i­cant poten­tial health ben­e­fits, includ­ing high lev­els of vit­a­min C, iron and antioxidants”

If you do not have wild elder­ber­ries on your prop­erty, and are inter­ested in plant­ing a few of these bushes, luck­ily they are quite easy to grow. They do best in par­tial shade (morn­ing sun is best) with excel­lent drainage and air cir­cu­la­tion. To max­i­mize fruit pro­duc­tion Okla­homa State Uni­ver­sity Fact Sheet HLA-6256–2 rec­om­mends: “Elder­ber­ries are only par­tially self-fruitful. Two or more cul­ti­vars should be planted near each other to pro­vide for cross-pollination. Since wild plants will be genet­i­cally differ­ent, two or more dif­fer­ent plants will act as polliniz­ers if they bloom within the same timeframe.”

The Fact Sheet also states the small effort will be rewarded in spades in a few short years with a size­able har­vest, not­ing that, “In the first year after plant­ing an elder­berry, a small crop will be pro­duced. Pro­duc­tion on mature plants start­ing in the third year can range from 12 to 15 pounds per plant. Har­vest will occur from mid-Au­gust to mid-September, depend­ing on loca­tion and cul­ti­var. Fruit­ing clus­ters usu­ally ripen over a period of 5 to 15 days.” Requir­ing much less care and main­te­nance than other small fruits, elder­ber­ries are a great starter crop to home food production.

One major draw­back of elder­ber­ries con­trary to other berries are the seem­ingly mil­lions of stems. Each indi­vid­ual berry has a stem that must be removed before cook­ing. Each berry is tiny, and it takes a fair amount of time to remove each stem from each berry before the berries are ready to cook. It is not par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult to remove these stems, just very time consuming.

I fig­ured a jam would be a use­ful ingre­di­ent to have, espe­cially in the fall. The tart and sweet fla­vor of the elder­berry jam will make a great base for sauces and reduc­tions to serve with duck and pork, or even a fla­vor­ing for a vinai­grette. Really the pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less, and I am very excited to add this new fla­vor to my cook­ing. While I am not sure I would be com­fort­able shar­ing wild rasp­berry bushes with mas­sive bears as Mrs. Rich shares in We Took to the Woods, I cer­tainly am thrilled to learn more about this native fruit.

Stephen Jones is an OSU Exten­sion Mas­ter Gar­dener volunteer.

Posted by Master Gardener on Aug 31 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.