(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)

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Celebrating elderberry season!

Walking in more than one Earthaven neighborhood in July, you would have enjoyed the dark, luminous clusters of elderberry hanging from both the older, taller trees and ones just beginning to bear. And while folks do harvest some of the white flower clusters earlier in the season, also enjoyed for food and medicine, it’s the berries that get folks out there with boxes and buckets.

This year, neighbors Susan and Bob Broadhead’s crop (at Full Circle) yielded many boxes and bags of goodness for families and herbalists across the watershed.

Soon, elderberry jams will appear, just for their deliciousness, and then the syrups, many doctored with favorite herbal extracts to boost the healing power of the berries, and to serve as season-changing tonics. Come Christmas, local herbalists will be selling a variety of healing concoctions made with elderberries. and those who haven’t made their own will be stocking up for Winter.

Varieties of Zev’s standard elderberry syrup recipe appear every year. What would you do with yours?

Zev’s Elderberry Syrup Recipe

 For 10 pounds (or about 1.5 gallons) of berries:
Cook elderberries slowly, on medium low heat, about 2.5 hours, adding 1/8 to 1/4 cup at a time of the liquid from a decoction of:

1) Appalachian Reishi mushroom, 2 cups
2) Maitake mushroom, 2 cups
3) Chaga mushroom, 2 cups
4) Burdock root dried, 1 cup AND

5a) for a preventative syrup, you can add 1 cup astragalus OR

5b) for a syrup to take once you get sick, you can add 1 cup osha root.

You also need 190 proof alcohol, (raw) honey, and apple cider vinegar in these proportions of berries to alcohol to honey to vinegar: 4:2:3:1.

After straining the decoction, cover the remainder with alcohol and set aside. Cook elderberry mixture till skins turn mushy—the consistency of thick tomato soup. Strain skins and seeds through a sieve and add to mushroom-root-alcohol concoction. Cook the elderberry syrup to a consistency between tomato soup and maple syrup. Let cool just to body temp before adding the honey. Mix in the vinegar and alcohol—also using the alcohol from the soaked ingredients.

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