welcome to our homestead being self-sufficient means growing a lot of what you need to survive and one of those things is growing plants which are medicinal in nature now there are a lot of plants which are medicinal in nature but today we’re going to highlight the elderberry we’re going to talk about how it grows and its health benefits let’s get started [Music] elderberries are amazing amazing plants the berries are the thing we’re going to concentrate on today in the past people have used bark in other parts of the
plant for medicinal purposes i think the bark was used for a laxative but you have to be careful with elderberry plants for unripe berries the stems the leaves things like that they contain trace amounts of cyanide just like an apple seed you’re saying to me wait a minute no apple seeds contain arsenic actually that’s not true i thought that too but they contain traces of cyanide also a tiny bit of a tiny trace of arsenic but the husk around the seed contains cyanide so let’s talk about how elderberry plants grow so first off you
can see that we’ve got two we’ve got a little one over here that’s not doing as well as this beautiful plant right here these plants are only a year and a half old so you can see the vigorous growth that elderberries actually put out it’s it’s fairly amazing now these elderberries are actually very easy to grow they do love a very rich soil so we are going to be actually adding compost and some composted leaves today to the base around the plants now you can see on this one the other ones have disappeared
we’ve added some mulched wood chips we do that to try to keep the weed pressure down because these elderberries don’t like the grasses and the weeds too much so there are several different varieties of elderberries and you really want to get ones that are self-pollinating but it’s always best to have more than one because even if they’re self-pollinating they can help and assist one another if you have more than just that one plant now it’s recommended that you have your elderberry plants planted six to ten
feet apart ours are eight feet apart so we’re in that range that is the best spacing for them because they are such vigorous growers they can get out of hand pretty quick and i’ll show you another reason why that happens so on this plant you can see the original trunk from the elderberry plant that we bought and you can see it’s within our mole cage here we have a terrible mole problem but that has done well but like other berry plants kind of like raspberries the root stock is where your new shoots are going to come up
from and new shoots come up all the time you can see over here outside of our our cage here all the way over to the side of our mound we’ve got another elderberry uh plant coming out from the rootstock here you can see our other plant the originals which are doing very well inside that mole cage that we built we’ve got another one over here about a foot and a half away and it’s roughly six feet tall so just be mindful of that wherever you plant these they are going to be incredibly vigorous like i said and
start to grow very very fast and they will get out of your growing area like raspberries very fast and you may have to prune them back and trim them back back into the area of containment that you want them so additionally when you choose your elderberry plants you want to choose the ones that are of the sambucus negra varieties there’s a lot of them but they have or they contain the blackberries those blackberries are the ones that are high in vitamin c high in antioxidants and those are the ones you can eat avoid the
ones with the red berries all together and in fact when you’re harvesting these you want to get rid of and pick off the green berries if there are any because those do contain those cyanide properties also so let’s talk about pruning with elderberries usually you don’t have to prune an elderberry at all if you don’t like but you can just start pruning it after year three for shape and anything before that you don’t really need to do because you want all that energy to go down into those roots
and create the strongest possible root system that you can so that they grow for a long time to come so we’re going to add that compost that i talked about earlier and we’re just going to add our raw compost we don’t have any manure in this but if you’re using a manure compost make sure it’s already composted down and it’s not hot at all on top of our fully broken down compost we also have some leaf mold compost now that isn’t fully broken down and the reason i’m putting that on there is to
also help with water mitigation so just like a wood chip which you can add also we like to add some partially composted leaves now the flower heads that form on these are where the berries form and they’re actually very very big this is actually about half of what this flower head was and this one plant had i think six of these flower heads on it so it takes a little bit to get a decent amount of juice but like i said the vigorous growth of these is will give you that amount of berries that you need for a decent amount of
elderberry syrup if you make that in just a few years so this article isn’t necessarily about propagating these but i’ll give you a quick tip on propagating it’s super simple you can take a cutting from an elderberry trunk like this to four buds so one two three four cut it at a 45 degree angle about halfway down from the fourth one we’re gonna plant it in the ground up until the second one so only the top two are gonna be sticking out and it will root actually very fast there’s some articles out there that will show
that and we will also make one in the future now elderberries are fairly drought resistant but if you can irrigate them i would because like in texas here we’ve had we haven’t had rain well it rained a tiny bit yesterday we haven’t rained in a few months so elderberries are fairly shallow rooted so if you have really well draining soil that moisture is going to leave pretty quick and they’re going to need to be watered so if you can irrigate them do it so these amazing little berries are full of antioxidants which help remove
free radicals from your body that boosts your immune system they’re also super high in vitamin c which also helps boost your immune system so this the juice from this a lot of people make a syrup with it is something people use for to combat the flu a lot so it’s also used to reduce inflammation especially with like a breathing sickness like a bronchitis it’ll reduce inflammation anywhere in your body but it’s especially helpful for something like a chest cold or something like that it also helps with
fever and headaches and joint pain and also constipation so don’t take too much the recommended dosage for an elderberry juice or syrup is just a tablespoon per day unless you’re sick and then they say that you can take up to three and that’s for an adult dosage now today’s article is not about how to make that elderberry syrup but a really quick recipe for you or a quick idea of the recipe is to take a slow cooker or crock pot take a couple pounds of frozen elderberries there and that freezing
will help break the cell walls of those elderberries so they’ll cook down quicker and they’ll release all of their juices without having to really mash them up too much we’ll put about a cup of water in the bottom we’re going to slow cook them for several hours and then strain them through a nut milk bag now make sure you don’t have any red or green berries mixed in there with them get those out first because they do contain that cyanide although it doses that small it’s not really going to hurt you but it
could upset your stomach make you nauseous and so on and so forth so be safe and get those out of there ahead of time now we’ve already done articles on some other medicinal plants like garlic we’ve shown you how to grow harvest cure garlic so that is also a really really powerful medicinal plant that you can grow on your homestead and additionally things like ginger turmeric cloves echinacea thyme peppermint hisop chamomile all of those are incredible medicinal plants and a lot of them are very interesting because they are
herbs that you would grow and cook with anyway but they have amazing medicinal properties also so i highly recommend that if you want to be more self-sufficient and get into homesteading that you start planting medicinal plants as well as plants for food because they can help you out a lot in a tough situation and as things get more scarce nowadays i think it’s probably a really good thing to do now i want you to go check out this article right here which shows you the ellen white method of how to plant a tree which will get you a strong
vigorous beautiful tree faster than any other method have a great day we love you see you next time bye you