Over 1 year ago we set the goal to start an elderberry farm. The market for sustainably grown elderberries is open in our home state, and we are going all in!
This is exciting for us because we have been learning and planning our homestead for years. Now we will have selected a reliable source of income and product which we can create more herbal products with.
Our elderberry class begins tomorrow February 6, 2023 and we will be learning about elderberry farming in-depth. We are taking Michael Kilpatrick’s online elderberry farming course.
We are very big on the use of elderberries as a family. When we are sick we almost always use an elderberry syrup, or a product containing elderberries. I have frequently used elderberries as an ingredient in my healing teas (above picture). We have also given our children elderberry gummies to keep them well. We have been using elderberries for years and they play a very special role in our life and health.
We have grown a vegetable garden before and plenty of sweet potato vines. Growing elderberry bushes is a new adventure and very exciting for us. It is certainly a growing investment! Pun intended.
I am going to be posting some informational updates on growing elderberries for the remainder of this post.
Day 1 of Elderberry Workshop
I am not going to lie, it was pretty boring. I have a hard time focusing some times, and the content was kind of dry. I get easily overwhelmed by too much information all at once if I do not have time to process it, and there was a lot of information in the first webinar.
My personal feelings aside, it was a very extensive informational introduction. I definitely picked up plenty of cultivating tips throughout the interview. The speaker, Charlie Little, is from a different state than I am (Arkansas) ie a different growing zone, so some of the information is variable.
Charlie had grown figs in the past, so it was easy for him to pick up with Elderberries pretty easily and to apply his fig cultivating knowledge to the growth of Elderberry bushes.
I was intrigued to hear that Charlie had also successfully cultivated wild elderberries into viable producing bushes. All you have to do is look for wild elderberry bushes with desirable traits.
I found this great video on propagating elderberry bushes. It is short and full of great information to get started!
The Holistic Family 