I love elderberries.  They are a native plant to this area, but I haven’t seen any wild ones around for years.  So I decided to plant some bushes about four years ago.

They bloom in June.  If you’re searching for them in the wild, this is a good time to look for them, as the huge white flowers are easy to spot.  Elderflowers can be used for cordials, fritters and even champagne.

I’m more interested in the berries, so I’m going to let my flowers stay on the bush.

‘Round about the end of August, the berries will ripen.  The clusters get so heavy that they weigh the plant down. Luckily, that means they’re closer to the ground and easier to pick.  My bushes ended up being 14 feet tall this year, so the top clusters are a bit of a challenge to reach!

Take a pair of scissors or pruning shears and cut off the entire cluster.

Now, I have to get all those teeny berries off the network of stems.

I tried picking them off by hand.  Took forever, and my fingers were stained purple for weeks.

I tried “forking” them – take a dinner fork and rake them off into a bowl.  Still took a long time (we’re talking hours and hours) and my fingers were still purple.

I discovered this method – totally by accident.  I had picked a five gallon bucket full (and trust me, I was NOT looking forward to de-stemming all those little puppies).  We had some unexpected company arrive, and I didn’t want them to rot in the fridge, so I took the easy way out.

Grabbed a paper shopping bag, dumped all the clusters in there, threw it in the freezer, and said to myself “I’ll just deal with them later.”

After our company left, I have to deal with them.  Sigh.  This is NOT one of my favorite things in life.  Got the bag out of the freezer downstairs, and on my way up, I accidentally dropped it.

Most of the berries just fell off the stems.  Shook it around a few times, and almost all the stems came up to the top – sans berries!

So that took about 5 minutes.  Works for me!

Notice that a lot of the little stems stick to the bag (which gets slightly damp after you take it out of the freezer).

An easy way to put them into freezer bags is to dump the cleaned berries into a quart canning jar – a canning funnel comes in handy here – then dump the jar into a quart freezer bag.  By weight, this is pretty close to a pound, so it’s easy to tell how many bags I need to take out for a batch of jelly or jam.

Now that I have ten pounds in the freezer, what should I make?  Stay tuned for Part 2.

“Time is passing. Yet,  for the United States of America, there will be no forgetting September the 11th.
We will remember every rescuer who died in honor.
We will remember every family that lives in grief.
We will remember the fire and ash, the last phone calls, the funerals of the children.”
–George W. Bush (1946- ), 43rd President of the United States.

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