A Few Sights, Heights, And Purple-tinged Delights!
It's that time of year, the cusp of the great get stuck inside for a few months phenomenon. A shorter way to describe it would be to say that winter is coming but I feel like someone already beat that phrase to death.
Anyway, every year I whip up a batch of elderberry syrup and take it intermittently throughout the winter to ward off the pathogens. There's a bunch of peer reviewed research floating about the interwebs about how cool elderberries are regarding their ability to battle the viral jerks that invade our immune systems, but I honestly just take elderberry syrup because of my personal, anecdotal experience with the stuff.
A lot of years I would wander through the woods by our lake and procure my elderberry stash for the winter. However, this year my dear friends invited me to their chunk of wilderness to help myself to as many elderberries as I could pick. Their elderberry trees were old growths!
In fact, their elderberries, apples, and cherry trees are so gigantic that my friend ordered a really cool platform that slides onto his pallet forks on their Kubota Trail Cat. Let me tell you, it is a lot nicer picking berries or apples on a platform than dangling off of a ladder or tractor bucket. Nice safety first move that was for sure!
Once I got the berries home, I de-leaved them and gave them all a rinse. I'm honestly not sure if I am going to turn this entire German Shepherd sized pile into just syrup. My hubs was hinting around about perhaps crafting some elderberry wine out of some of the harvest, and let's just say I am not feeling disagreeable to that suggestion.
How about ya'll? Have any of you made your own elderberry syrup, wine, or jelly? I love hearing about what my fellow Hivians do with their harvests!
Perhaps in my next post I will do a step by step tutorial of how I make my syrup, but as you all know me, my method changes from year to year dictated by what I have on hand, so we shall see what manifests:)
Make wine! Make wine! MAKE WINE!
LOL! That is so going to happen!!
I planted elderberries this year and they all had berries. But the birds got every last one just before they were ripe. Next year: netting...
So I got a stockpile of elderberry online, the brand I've used for a few years to hold me over until next year.
Ah yes, I have lost an entire crop of cherries to our feathered friends before, I feel your pain, and double yes too netting!
Hopefully you'll get a crazy huge harvest next year!
Several years ago my husband brought home a couple of buckets full of elderberries which he picked on railroad property, back when he was working for the railroad. I turned it all into juice, thinking I would make syrup. Eventually. A couple of years went by, and I found out you have to be careful about not getting any of the stems into the process because they are poisonous, and I couldn't remember how careful I had been, so I threw it all out. What a waste! I haven't gone searching for elderberries since. My daughter has sometimes procured dried elderberries from a retail place and made her own syrup that way.
That was a tale of tossed elderberry and wasted labor woe, I am truly sorry that happened. It seems a lot of people buy the dried berries for their syrup making, and I noticed most of the recipes online call for dried berries too, I find that interesting. I hate it when useful plants have alkaloids in certain parts of them, it's like yet another thing to remember!
I seriously wanted to pick elderberry this year and didn't...
Someone gave us elderberry jelly once when I was a kid. It wasn't bad. It just wasn't the wild blackberry jelly that we were used to.
My daughter pits whether on a sheet pan and dehydrates them in the oven then press them in an air right container. When she needs syrup, she throws them in a pot of billing water and reduces it to the consistency she wants.
I could go on for a while...
Oh, you just gave me a childhood memory flashback, I grew up on wild blackberry jelly...and dumplings, I miss that.
LOL! You can go on all your want, I love it! I totally like your daughter's method of preservation and syrup making. I make up enough syrup for a few months and freeze it in little ice cubes, then throw it in zipper bags in the freezer so I have a bit of a grab and go scenario. I also stir honey into the cooled syrup and keep it in a mason jar in the fridge, it sorta just depends on my mood.
And see, I could go on too, lol lol!