Wild Food Foragers of America - Elderbery Page 1

Vol 1, No 6
Page 1

Common elderberry: Sambucus canadensis
Family (Caprifoliaceae)
HONEYSUCKLE FAMILY

October 2003

One umbrell, many flowers. Each flower, left intact, makes a berry at its base.

One umbrell, loaded with berries that have a month to go before they ripen. Green berries can be used to make home made capers!

Elderberry bushes tend to grow along fence lines, at the edges of woods, and alongside untended houses. They'll grow in your yard, too, if you want them there. From spring to fall, you see them all along the highway, all over Eastern America. As the photo shows, they rise about 10-12 feet tall, in a bushy shape, on straight leggy, hollow canes the Indians found useful for making pipes, musical instruments, and dart guns. Elder is impossible not to spot when they begin displaying their huge showy white umbrells. (I say that, but I know people who have never noticed them until I point them out.) The flowers have a faint yet unmistakable fragrance of honeysuckle that tastes exceptionally good in fritters and pancakes, the most customary way to eat elder flowers (recipe on Page 3). These flowers freeze well, so gather a lot, beginning in early summer.

The gathering season for the berries is mid-thru-late summer. One doesn't eat raw elderberries. They have to be cooked or fermented, incorporated with other things like sugar or grapes, to be edible. But they are delicious when prepared, and plentiful, and the ripe berries can be used in pies, to make elderberry wine and my favorite--elderberry jelly (recipes on Page 3).

If you harvest the flowers carelessly, you won't get any berries, but I'm going to share my trick for having your pancake and eating the berries too. And I'll share another trick I discovered for harvesting the berries -- without the tedium -- without staining everything-- which many people view as so much trouble that they avoid fooling with elderberries. My way makes it incredibly easy!

So, this is a heavy 4 page issue. Page 2a deals with elderflowers, and Page 2b deals with elderberries, making for a long and fruitful harvesting season and years of joyful wild food foraging.

The bush above has been growing in my yard for several years now. It provides us with about half the flowers we use, but to harvest enough berries we have to go out into the countryside on the lesser traveled roads, and into public fields and parks where we know the elderberries grow. Follow me, but first let's go over getting a positive ID on the plant. Some people fear confusing it with hemlock which also has white umbrell flowers and hollow stems, but little else in common to confuse it with elder (see below).

Scientific classification: Elderberries are members of the honeysuckle family, Caprifoliaceae. American elder is classified as Sambucus canadensis, blue elder as Sambucus caerulea, and European black elder as Sambucus nigra. Purple elder is a variety of European black elder, Sambucus nigra purpurea.
American elder, or sweet elder, is the variety featured here, native to the Eastern U.S, grows about 10-12 feet high and tends to grow in colonies. Its thick, soft stems break easily and are filled with cottony, spongy tissue.
Blue elder, which also has edible fruit, reaches up to 50' in height and grows only in the wild.
European black elder reaches up to 30' in height, now naturalized in the United States, has coarse, warty stems, leaves that give off a disagreeable odor when crushed, and pleasantly scented flowers. Many varieties have been bred for cultivation. One variety, called purple elder, has small, dark leaves and pink flowers that make it popular as a garden shrub and in flower arrangements.

Elderberries have large leaves that grow in pairs along the stem. The leaves are pinnately compound, which means each leaf is made up of several leaflets that attach in pairs to a central leaf stem, with a single leaflet at the end. The leaflets are oblong to elliptical and have a toothed edge. Here are some photos showing the leaf shapes of elder and how they come off the stems, and comparisons with the poisonous hemlock.


New bud cluster atop leaf pairs.	One leaf, several leaflets growing opposite one another on the stem.

Hemlock umbrell contains bud clusters that stand distinctly apart from each other.

Elderberry is listed in the American Medical Association's 1985 edition AMA Handbook of Poisonous Injurious Plants because the roots, stems, and leaves contain cyanogenic glucosides (cyanide), which can cause vomiting if eaten. Nevertheless, these very parts of the elder tree have been used for centuries in traditional folk medicine, cosmetics, cough syrups, ointments, teas. We are not going to concern ourselves with any of that, though, because I and my friends have been eating the flowers and the berries for years and I'm still around to tell you about it. The berries are said to contain as much Vitamin C as rosehips.

Identification, Harvest and Preparation:
ID tips, slide show and colorful photos are on Page 2, linked to below.

History, Botanical info, and Recipes: on Page 3, linked to below.

Information Exchange : Subscribers and visitors, please add your knowledge of this weed here--recipes, experiences, anecdotes, questions, opinions. (A unique thread is posted with every issue to gather more information. Please do check out our Wild Edibles Info Exchange.

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Thanks, and enjoy!

Standing knee deep in abundance!

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Disclaimer:

Information given in the newsletter is educational but should not be considered definitive. Every effort is made to present clear testimonials from personal experience, however, different people may have different reactions than the author's experience. The author makes no attempt to identify every plant. If you choose to eat weeds, start out with a small amount and notice your reaction. Considerable effort is made to provide readers access to additional materials for the positive identification, harvesting and preparation of wild edible weeds, BUT you are ultimately responsibe for your own education, actions and diet.
To avoid poisonous look-alikes, foragers should always identify by SEVERAL indicators (by leaf, flower, seed pod, root and stem, by shape, texture, veination, color, hairiness, growth pattern, season, etc.) before eating from the wild. Different plants might look very similar to the untrained eye.
You should not pick weeds in polluted areas--along roadsides, near trash dumps, in fields or gardens likely to have been sprayed with pesticides or commercial fertilizers, etc.
You should not over-pick. The general rule of thumb is to harvest no more than 20% of an area, leaving the plants ample opportunity to regenerate for the next year, the next generation, and leaving something behind for the next forager. Becoming familiar with propagation methods can assist you in determining the most prudent conservation techniques for each plant.
You should always wash weeds before eating them. Dust is everywhere, insects and slugs naturally make their homes in vegetation, and birds do fly overhead! Let common sense be your guide.
Do not hesitate to call a doctor if you should have an adverse reaction to anything you touch or ingest in the wild. If you can bring the physician a sample, or identify the offending plant by name, all the better.