Elderberries with Lyndon at Earthaven Ecovillage

Written by Courtney Brooke on May 15, 2021. Posted in Businesses, Gardens, Village Economics.

(Transcript from video)

Elderberry Mother Plant and Rootings

Lyndon: Hello everyone. This is a rooting that we did from a plant called the Magnolia Elderberry. It has nothing to do with magnolia plant. It’s just a variety name. We keep them in water for a while and change out the water two or three times a week. It’s the easy way to germinate roots and then we change up the water three times a week. Keep them in a bucket then they grow roots. You see the amazing little white thingies? Those are the roots… then go back in the bucket. After they get roots we put them in pots and we grow them up.

We sell the plants. The thing about elderberries is they make these amazing berries that are really good for medicinal purposes, especially colds and stuff like that. You have to have two different kinds of elderberries. We have this very vigorous growing Magnolia Elderberry and we have the Nova. Somewhere around here we have a Medicine Wheel which comes from Earthaven but we don’t have it in this group.

I can take you over here and show you the actual mother plant those Magnolia Elderberries came from. This is the Magnolia Elderberry it was planted out of a pot around 2018.. it was about the spring of 2018. It was about this tall coming out of the pot. We planted it here in the ground and it’s to thicken off. I was like is this an unusual elderberry. Kind of a lot of them grow to this height but most are a little taller this. I measured it one day we got up here with a ladder. It’s got up to 11 and a half feet, I think it’s that was last fall, I think maybe it’s even taller but it is an elderberry that came from the Piedmont. Either Chuck Marsh or Debbie Lienhart brought from the Piedmont probably a similar way.

Elderberry at Useful Plants Nursery

Courtney Brooke: Where can we get some elderberries like this?

Lyndon: At Useful Plants Nursery. We sell them Useful Plant Nursery in fact, which is where we are. But we take our plants on the road. We’re gonna take them to the herb fest, which is going to be May 1^st and 2^nd this year at the Ag center. If you’re going to the airport (Asheville airport) you go down the road a little farther and the Ag center is on the right.

Courtney Brooke: Okay get your elderberries… make elderberry syrup… UPN (Useful Plants Nursery)

Elderberry (Sambucus canadensis)

elderberries, elderberry, lyndon, medicinal, Useful, useful plants nursery

Courtney Brooke

Courtney Brooke (she/her) is an ancestor who was a Social Ecologist, Regenerative Designer, and educator whose work aims to reconnect people with a sense of belonging to place. Her work in the world aims to address the root cause of today’s overwhelming ecological challenges – that humans are starved of a sense of belonging to the places they live. Courtney Brooke was raised on a small farm in North Georgia, and has been guided by a lifetime of living close to the land. Her greatest teachers have been the Appalachian Mountains, the land of Aotearoa, and Selu, the Corn Mother. She holds a degree in Ecology from the Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, and has 10 years of experience facilitating earth-based education, ecological landscape design, women’s rites of passage, and cultural healing. Courtney Brooke has taught and facilitated environmental education curriculum, Deep Ecology, Permaculture Design Courses, hands-on craft and farming workshops, and Holistic Management to a wide range of audiences in nine countries from toddlers to adults and everyone in between. Deeply committed to spreading the healing that comes from belonging to the places we live, Courtney Brooke is passionate about designing learning opportunities that celebrate life. She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage where she tends the land, raises food, participates in communal ritual agriculture, swims in wild water, enjoys the mysterious blessing of being alive, and tends her own wild Hearth. She loves cooking home-grown and wild foraged foods, playing her flute to the sunrise, running on mountain trails, making compost piles, crafting from natural materials, and bringing people together to create beauty that feeds the holy.