Food & Cooking

Let’s Make Elderberry Syrup and Turn the Kitchen Purple

Let’s embrace chaos.

Photo taken of elderberries before I picked them

One of my fondest memories from childhood is enjoying homemade elderberry pie. My Dad, a fantastic pie maker, indulged us regularly in the summer with pies filled with almost black chewy berries sweetened with sugar.

We moved west when I was about eight. Oh, how I missed elderberry pie. Within a few years, we moved to a home on several acres, and my Dad planted an elderberry bush, the kind we had in Ohio, known as American Elderberry or Common Elderberry.

When you plant a moisture-loving bush in a very wet climate

This variety of elderberry isn’t native to the Pacific Northwest. We lived in the drier part of the state, but with lots of watering, the bush flourished. It produced lots of dark luscious elderberries, and once again, we had elderberry pie in the summer.

Nine years ago, my Dad gifted me two American Elderberry plants for my garden, and I live in the wet part of the state. What happens when you plant a bush that loves moisture in a climate that gets rain nine months out of the year? An elderberry tree, twenty-six feet tall, producing over sixteen pounds of berries!