Growing things: Elderberries

Since you can’t copywrite nutritional facts about Elderberries, I totally didn’t steal this from Wolfram Alpha.

Here’s part two of my special series on growing food and harvesting things accidentally. This time, I trash-talk elderberries. Part one is here.

Why are they called Elderberries if they age so poorly? 

The first thing to know about Elderberries is that there is a lot of hype about them.

Human beings are prone to a great deal of hyperbole. I, myself, am a human being, and I may well be one of the most hyperbolic people you will ever meet. Nobody has as much hyperbole as I do. I have profound hyperbolima. I won the Vince Lombardi Trophy on the last three Hyperbole Sundays.

One of the things humans are prone to do because of their hyperbolic nature is to prefix the word "super" with things to declare their ability to exceed expectations. Here are three examples:

1. Superman is a fictional prescient being who lives on Earth and exceeds the standard physics that retrains the local beings. He flies, he bends steel, he is bulletproof and all that. A normal man can't do that, so one who can do this kind of stuff must be a "super" man.

2. Supermarkets are markets that are much, much larger than traditional markets. While some markets are highly specialized, offering wide varieties of few things, other markets carry only a few varieties of many things. Supermarkets are markets that carry a wide variety of many things. Normal markets are smaller, have fewer parking lots, and are less likely to embrace anti-competitive practices on a large scale [citation needed]; hence they are "super" markets.

3. Supervisors are managers who make more money than regular workers because they are responsible for those who work beneath them. Their job is to watch over the work of others and ensure that they don't organize in a way that would improve their quality of living. Visors are simple observational devices worn by plucky engineers on spaceships in socialist utopias and, therefore, have no interest in keeping the working man oppressed. "Super" visors are -- well, never mind, this got stupid.

The point is someone in the great marketing zeitgeist decided that people were unaware of the non-scientifically proven properties of certain types of food. To improve the margins of those who could corner the markets on those types of food, they declared them "Super" foods. 

“Elderberries have some pretty neat properties”

Elderberries are one such "superfood." While entire libraries have been written on the historical, religious, nutritional, and anthropological manifestations that have resulted in us believing one food is superior to another, we can see that Elderberries have some pretty neat properties.

First, they are tiny berries.

And second, much like people, there is significant debate on how elderberries experience gender.

Dad joke incoming: These cisplants grew up here. If they’d been moved from a previous location, they’d be transplants.

YO, DAWG? ARE YOU SAYING ELDERBERRIES PLAY WITH BARBIES?

“It’s reductive and demeaning to say that there are “boy” plants and there are “girl” plants.”

It is as if thousands of voices suddenly all cried out at once, demanding I retract the notion that elderberries experience gender. Science calls plants that house their male and female flowers on separate plants "Dioecious." Kiwis, asparagus, currents, and spinach are just some plants with male and female flowers exclusively across one plant or another. It's reductive and demeaning to say that there are "boy" plants and there are "girl" plants-- but in the case of Elderberries, most people argue that the plants are "Monocious." Monocious plants grow flowers that are both male and female. So, technically, it's reductive and demeaning to say there are "boy" flowers and "girl" flowers. Either way, the greenhouse that sold me my elderberry plants told me they were Dioecious-- a fact debated on the internet and proven incorrect by the fact that my two elderberry bushes both flower and produce fruit.

This confusion explains why, when I impulsively bought an elderberry bush to fill in the fence line between my weird neighbor's house and my garden, I ended up buying two. Well played, unnamed garden center, well played.

So why grow them at all?

So, you may ask yourself why one would even consider growing elderberries. And this is a good line of questioning. There are many folk remedies out there that tout elderberry as a healing medicine. And there is a nice, ornamental feature to the plant.

“Adding elderberries to your yard will hugely increase the number of drunk birds hanging around.”

And, a real bonus in my garden is that because Elderberries actually ferment while they hang on the vine, adding elderberries to your yard will hugely increase the number of drunk birds hanging around.

For me, it was because I didn't like the idea of filling my fence line with raspberries, which are delicious, easy to grow and harvest, but have thorns. So, when stumbling around in a daze at the local garden center, I saw an elderberry plant. Vaguely remembering that there were supposed medicinal properties in elderberries and then remembering that I like tea, I woke up from a fugue state with a pair of elderberry plants in the back of my minivan.

That happens more regularly than I care to admit, actually.

I’ve been told that I garden like Hunter S. Thompson, which I took as a compliment, even though I’ve never used that much mescaline.

Anyway, my wonton dislike of thorns manifested in purchasing a pair of elderberry plants five years ago. I am currently producing a fairly decent crop of elderberries that are markedly different from raspberries in that they are not delicious and can poison me.

“ Elderberries, if picked too soon, contain enough hydrocyanic acid to cause a decent degree of illness.”

That's right. Elderberries, if picked too soon, contain enough hydrocyanic acid to cause a decent degree of illness if eaten raw. The good news is that you aren't likely to make a pig of yourself eating at the elderberry bush because they taste gross. In fact, I prefer the taste of serviceberries when I'm looking to eat something that grows in my backyard that will make me sick. However minor the threat of poisoning may or may not be, one should pick only the ripest elderberries and clean out all the leaves and stems from your harvest before you shove them into your dehydrator.

Everybody knows that Elderberry tea is the prefered liquid of the world’s largest rodent.

The berries are easy enough to reduce to something useable and potentially less poisonous. Pick ‘em once they’re about 30 seconds from fermenting, throw ‘em in a pot, crush with enough force to extract the juice, but not so much force that you crack open the seeds and spill out their poison. Then run the whole damn thing trough a coffee filter (or mesh strainer, if you’re fancy. Cook it down until it’s thick and gooey. Good job, you just made Elderberry syrup. Dilute it in hot water and enjoy Elderberry Tea. I found that the yeild I get from two bushes at any given harvest is rarely ever more than enough to make about 4 oz. of syrup.

Learn more:

Are you looking for more concrete and helpful information about elderberries? There are lots of people who are experts on the subject of growing elderberries.

1. The University of Vermont Extension Center for Sustainable Agriculture published an incredible report on the viability of elderberries for commercial farming in 2016. ElderberryGuideComplete.pdf (uvm.edu)

2. The University of Wisconsin has published a similar guide:
   Growing Currants, Gooseberries, and Elderberries in Wisconsin; however, you are warned that this document is primarily concerned with terrifying descriptions of all the diseases your elderberries and currents can contract.

3. WebMD, where semi-literate people turn to be afraid they are dying, suggests you might not want to eat elderberries so you don’t get too healthy.

I guess I’m growing things now: How do I make it a food?

"How do I make it a food?" will be a non-fiction book about finding and creating bounty around you- specifically by growing or harvesting things you can use to improve your life.

I realize I've been doing a lot of, admittedly, half-assed research on the various things I have growing here this summer, and I could pretty quickly turn my 2 p.m. "What the hell am I going to do with these elderberries?" existential crisis into something helpful to others and myself.

The answer, by the way, is dry them-- but that's a chapter to be written later.

I guess I’m growing things now. How do I make it a food?

Great question. And it is probably something you could have considered before planting. But I get it, you know? Who knew that those elderberries would do so well? How could you be expected to know what to do with all that Lemon Balm that won’t quit cluttering your front garden? There’s so much wintergreen growing in that sandy area behind the cabin. What should you do with all this prosperity?

As tempting as it is to ask oneself to check one’s privilege, I understand if one wanted to be shamed, one would call one’s grandmother more often. The guiding principle of this book is about finding and creating bounty around you. How these things came into your life is less important than what you do with them next. If that means, in the case of cucumbers and tomatoes, for example, eating them directly off the vine without even washing them, that’s fine. (Unless you’ve used pesticides, which, let’s face it, if you’re reading this, you haven’t.)

See, there are few better things in life than a cool, wet cucumber to sate your cottonmouth after coming home late from a long night of carousing. In fact, in many ways, the fresh-of-the-vine cucumber is considerably better for you than a hastily ordered sadness pizza. (Sadness pizza is an impulsively ordered fast food pizza delivered to you in your bedroom at night. It’s not good for you, and the service will invariably screw up the order, but you’ll really just want a dopamine hit from the smell and feel of comfortable food being at your beck and call.)

Ok, frankly, a sadness cucumber is just as depressing as a sadness pizza, but at least it’s not pooped out of a dough machine when you hit the right API calls on your delivery app. You know what-- it doesn’t matter. Nobody wins a sadness contest.

The Bottom Of the Apple Barrel

I photographed these apples at some point in my life, but Meta has helpfully stripped all the meta data from the image in the process of exporting it to my collection. Thanks, Meta!

I recently shocked one of my students with the announcement and demonstration that you can simply pick an apple from a tree, bite it, and it will be delicious.

I saw a perfectly ripe Gala apple growing in the school’s orchard while the student and I were on a walk and talk, and without thinking, I plucked the apple, wiped it on my fleece, and took a bite.

As I walked on, happily munching, the student’s eyes widened, and I had to stop and ask him what was wrong.

“You’re eating an apple,” he stammered.

I nodded.

“From a tree. You just picked it from the tree and ate it.”

I nodded again. I realized he was experiencing part of the tree-to-table process he’d never considered before.

“Well,” I said, “I should probably have washed it first.”

“You can just do that?” he asked.

I looked around at the small orchard the school’s agriculture department ran. “I mean, probably not. I should probably have asked-- But the truth is, nobody is going to miss this one apple.”

To my surprise, the boy was not yet following.

“The tree just makes these?” he asked, gesturing at the apples around him. “For free?”

I nodded and took another bite. “Yeah,” I said, chewing. “You want one?”

“Sure,” he said. And he reached out and grabbed the biggest, greenest, most blighted apple in the entire orchard.

And when it was sour and unpleasant, he spit it out and demanded how to eat such garbage.

“Wrong tree,” I said. “That one’s not ripe, and because of whatever’s living in it, will need to be cut up a little.” I plucked him a gala apple from the tree I had picked mine from. “Try this one.”

The student was a little trepidatious, but he took a small bite and smiled as he chewed. “It’s tougher but sweeter,” he said.

“Then what?”

“Apples.”

“It is an apple,” I reminded him.

“I mean from a store.”

I nodded in understanding, but in actuality, I was anything but.

#

We spoke for a few more minutes, and eventually, I learned that, for this student, one only gets apples when they force them on you at McDonald’s with a Happy Meal. He’s never taken one at the lunch line and assumes the ones at grocery stores are ingredients, not food.

#

This is the state of understanding of where food comes from for many people in our country. Food comes from a store, which comes from a farm, which is a place where they have red barns and white picket fences and cows that make milk.

The idea that food could grow in your backyard, whether you’ve tended it or not, is not only an anathema for them but contrary to their sense of safety and trust. Students often say that they won’t eat home-raised eggs. They assume some level of security born of mechanical laying farming systems is not present. I try not to correct them on this because, hey, at least they eat eggs from time to time. God forbid I take these students through a mass-industrial chicken factory farm-- they’d probably stop eating forever. There’s a reason that today’s kids can’t tell the difference between Tubby Custard and raw chicken nugget slurry.