How We Grow American Elderberries in Northern Minnesota
In 2021, I planted 1,740 elderberry cuttings.
Today, I think I can find three or four of those original plants.
So if you're here expecting me to tell you that we bought some land in northern Minnesota, planted elderberries and immediately figured out how to grow them perfectly, I'm going to disappoint you.
The year we planted happened to be the year Minnesota experienced an extreme drought.
We didn't have the irrigation system we have now, and almost everything died.
So we bought more cuttings, installed irrigation, and replanted.
And we've been learning ever since.
Today, we have more than 5,000 plants and nearly 30 named varieties growing on the farm.
Some things about northern Minnesota make growing American elderberry harder. Some things actually work in our favor.
And after several years of experimenting, killing plants, fighting mites, amending soil and learning what different varieties do here, we've gotten considerably better at knowing what these plants want.
Elderberries Are Surprisingly Picky About Where They Live
One of the biggest things I've learned about American elderberry is that success can be very regional. A variety can be a fantastic producer on somebody else's farm and be completely unhappy on mine.
That's one reason I've planted so many varieties. I currently grow about 30 varieties so that I can watch them over several years, identify the winners and losers, and eventually propagate more of what works here.
We're now four or five years into that experiment, and the differences are becoming pretty obvious.
Some varieties handle our winters better.
Some tolerate our soil better.
Some grow well but don't produce the way we'd like.
And there are varieties that other growers absolutely love that simply aren't happy here.
There's no sense spending years fighting a plant that doesn't want to live on your farm when another variety is thriving a few rows over.
Our Soil Wasn't Exactly Waiting for Elderberries
Our soil is one of the things working against us.
We have heavier, more clay-based soil than elderberries naturally prefer, so we've spent a lot of time figuring out how to improve the growing area.
Fortunately, we live in an agricultural and forestry region where we have access to some useful materials.
There's a wild-rice processing plant nearby, so we can get entire trailer loads of rice hulls for basically the cost of delivery. We also have sawmills nearby, which gives us access to sawdust. And because there are plenty of cattle farms around us, manure isn't exactly difficult to find either.
We've started combining those materials to build more organic matter into the soil.
For new planting areas, we may start a full year before an elderberry ever goes into the ground.
We'll put down roughly 6–10 inches of organic material over a strip about six feet wide and incorporate it into the existing soil. Sometimes we'll make multiple passes so we're mixing the material throughout that upper layer. Then we let it sit.
The sawdust and rice hulls need time to break down. We may age piles for a year or more before we ever use them. As those materials decompose, we're trying to create a better environment in that upper soil layer where elderberries actually grow.
Elderberries are relatively shallow-rooted, so we don't have to rebuild the earth six feet down. We're trying to make the part they use better.
We Farm Somewhere Between “Organic” and “Conventional”
People sometimes want agriculture to fit into one neat box.
Organic or Conventional.
We're somewhere in the middle.
We try to use as much organic material as we reasonably can to feed the plants, improve the soil, retain moisture and reduce weed competition.
We don't use conventional pesticides or herbicides.
The problem with finding something that will kill the weeds growing around an elderberry is that there's a pretty good chance it'll kill the elderberry too.
So a lot of weed control here is exactly as glamorous as you'd imagine:
Manual weeding and weed whacking.
We're also continuing to experiment with different ways of producing and using organic material on the farm. One idea we're looking at is growing our own green manure crop that could provide some of the moisture and nitrogen needed to balance the high-carbon materials like sawdust and rice hulls.
That's probably the biggest thing I'd tell anyone about the way we farm:
It's still evolving.
We're constantly watching what happens and adjusting.
So while we actually follow organic farming practices, we haven't gone through the steps to be certified organic because that's actually more complicated that you'd think.
There Are Two Kinds of Elderberry Growers…
If there is one lesson I learned very quickly after losing that first planting, it's that elderberries like water.
A lot.
We now have an irrigation well and drip irrigation running through our rows, and without it, we wouldn't have an elderberry crop here.
There's a running joke I've heard in the elderberry-growing world that there are two kinds of elderberry growers:
The ones who irrigate and have harvestable berries, and the ones who don't irrigate and don't have harvestable berries.
After what happened to my first 1,740 plants, I'm firmly in the first group.
Northern Minnesota Changes How We Prune
Our climate also means we can't simply copy what growers farther south are doing.
In Missouri, for example, growers may cut elderberries all the way back to the ground and still have enough growing season for the new canes to come up and produce.
We can't count on that here because everything happens faster.
Spring arrives, the plants wake up and suddenly we're trying to get pruning, feeding, irrigation, weed control and everything else handled in a relatively short window.
Miss a step and you may spend the rest of the season catching up.
So we prune differently. We remove the smaller, weaker canes and generally keep the thicker canes that are about thumb-sized or larger. We try to retain canes that are three years old or younger and cut those back to roughly two or three feet.
That gives the plant some established cane and stored energy so it can leaf out earlier and start growing as soon as our season allows.
In an unusually long, hot year, we might have gotten away with cutting everything to the ground. But you don't build your farming system around the one year out of ten when northern Minnesota decides to cooperate.
Cold Weather Actually Gives Us One Advantage
The shorter growing season isn't all bad, because our winters change insect life cycles too. Some pests that cause major problems for elderberry growers farther south simply aren't much of a problem here.
Unfortunately, we still have one pest that taught me a fairly expensive lesson, though.
Eriophyid mites.
They're tiny, but the damage isn't.
A couple of years ago, mites had spread through so much of our mature crop that we essentially didn't have a harvest worth taking.
At one point, I could see mite damage on probably 60% of the plants.
I tried treatments used by growers in other regions, but the mites kept coming back.
Eventually another elderberry grower in Canada told me they'd had success using a micronized sulfur treatment. The particular product they used wasn't labeled for elderberry in the United States, so I found a compatible product here with the appropriate label and tried it.
The difference was enormous.
This year, instead of mite damage throughout the farm, I've found roughly a three- or four-foot section showing some damage.
That's farming.
Sometimes the answer isn't in a book.
Sometimes it's a grower several hundred miles north saying, “Hey, this worked for us.”
Even Our Short Harvest Season Has a Silver Lining
Our harvest usually starts around the middle to third week of August and can run into September.
A hard frost ends the party.
That gives us a much shorter window than growers in places like Missouri.
But I've noticed something interesting.
Our berries seem almost hurried to ripen.
On our farm, we can usually pick through a field in a couple of passes. Growers with longer seasons may need to make three, four or five passes as different clusters ripen.
I can't tell you that northern Minnesota is the easiest place in America to grow elderberries. It isn't.
But after doing this for several years, I've also stopped looking at our location only as a disadvantage.
Sure, it gives us different challenges, but it gives us different advantages as well.
We're Still Figuring This Farm Out
We're now growing nearly 30 named varieties because I wanted to know which ones actually belong here.
We're changing the soil before we plant.
We're aging local agricultural byproducts to use as organic matter.
We've changed how we prune.
We've installed irrigation.
We've figured out a mite treatment that works here.
And we'll change things again.
That's one of the things I enjoy about growing elderberries. I don't think we're ever going to reach a point where I walk out into the field and think, “Yep. Nothing left to learn here.”
There are breeding programs working on better American elderberry varieties. Researchers are trying to figure out mechanical harvesting. Growers are comparing varieties, soils, pests, pruning methods and harvest techniques across very different parts of the country.
We're doing our own version of that here in northern Minnesota.
Plant something.
Watch it.
Learn from it.
Keep the winners.
Change what isn't working.
And occasionally lose 1,736 plants so you really remember the lesson.
Comments