Elderberry Live Staking How-To Guide - 1 Million Community Fruit Trees Initiative

There's the node just below the cutting. This one little elderberry shrub here could potentially turn into 28 elderberry shrubs. Nice. Hello dear friends we are with our friend here the elderberry and this is one of the key trees that will help us to plant 1 million community fruit trees over the next decade through a grassroots collaborative effort of thousands of people which hopefully includes you. One of the reasons we've chosen elderberry is because it's an incredible native plant that benefits pollinators, produces abundant yields of incredible fruit that's also very medicinal and it's one of the easiest to propagate. And that fruit's wonderful for humans and all the other animals including many birds. Helps with riparian restoration. Pretty much the easiest plant to propagate through live cutting is that right? I would say so yes. All right so let's dive in let's help you get started. First things first although you can harvest from any elderberry plant what are we looking for with deciding which plants we're harvesting from? Anytime we're choosing plants to propagate we want to select from parent plants that exhibit the best qualities for vigor, productivity, disease resistance, berry size and sweetness and a plant that is going to yield generously in propagation material. So with elderberry we're looking for nice plump juicy berries, a vibrant looking plant, large clumps with many shoots. Absolutely you got it. All right so we have a plant here that is about three or four years old? Yes this plant is in its third year now. Based on what we're seeing here how much of this could we harvest without doing harm to this plant while harvesting the resources that we need in order to propagate it? Best practices are to never take more than one third of an established shrub like this. So at most we'll take one, two, three, four of these shoots. And then we're going to get about how many cuttings from each of these shoots? This cutting has got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven cuttings. Okay so we're looking at potentially 25 or 30 cuttings which means this one little elderberry shrub here could potentially turn into 28 elderberry shrubs. So we're talking about being able to really multiply through the power of the elderberry. Let's take a cutting. So what is the ideal size for the width of the branch that we're taking from? With elderberries we want to find branches that are a minimum of a half inch in width and a maximum of around an inch to an inch and a half. So let's take a look at what we've got here. This is the width of my thumb and we've got a measuring tape so we can really show you this. So we're looking at about five eighths. So this is a pretty ideal, this is kind of the smallest one you'd want to ideally propagate. Exactly. Now if you only have smaller like this size, can people use these or are these too small if this is all they have in their area? Absolutely. Elderberries can even grow from tiny branches like this. The difference is when we're live staking, we really want a lot of vigor and the larger the branch that you cut, the faster it's going to root and the more energy it's going to have to establish itself quickly in a wild environment. So where you have the opportunity to harvest the larger width, we absolutely encourage you to do that. But if you only have small ones, then that is what you're going to have for your material. So let's measure my thumb. My thumb is about three quarters of an inch and my pointer finger is about a half inch. So if you have a thumb or a pointer finger like me, you don't even need a ruler. Where shall I cut this? Cut it as close to the ground as you can. So now we have our branch. How do we turn this into cuttings? Step one is to defoliate. We want to So this really goes against what most people think. Most people who are new to this think you got to keep the leaves, but at this point it has no roots, so it needs no leaves. The leaves are how it sweats, so it will lose moisture from even inside of the stalk if we leave those leaves and sweat pores on there. So now we have the branch and how do we decide what is going to be the length of the cuttings or how the cuttings are going to come from this? So we recommend a cutting length of 8 to 20 inches, but with elderberries the more important thing is that we have one node per cutting. That way we maximize our propagation material. In this case where you have the first node just four inches up and a tight internodal distance, this is about nine inches. So we're gonna go ahead and make this one cutting. It's a really useful thing to measure the length of the width of your fingers. You can see that mine is nine inches. This becomes a very helpful tool with elderberry live staking. Saves you a lot of time. And one question Eric, what is a node? A node is where the bud scars from the leaves form and this is where buds are sitting dormant and new leaves will emerge. With elderberries the nodes will produce roots but most of the roots will come from the little lenticels which is why we only need one node per cutting with elderberry. Okay so let's go ahead and make our first cutting. Tell me where to go ahead and do that. Cut it right here. So I'm going to go flat for the top and is it just above the node? Just above the node exactly. Okay. Excellent. We want to give this a nice sharp angle so that it goes into the ground easily. So the bottom is going to be about a 45 degree angle and that also makes it so you know the top is flat and the bottom is an angle making it so that if you drop these you won't end up planting it upside down. So for our next cutting we'll go ahead and cut our angle here at the bottom and then a nice 90 degree cut at the top. Point on the bottom, flat on top, node just below the cutting. We have three cuttings now and we're going to continue on. Now I'm noticing that as we get further up there's a larger distance between the cutting or between the nodes. So show us how we do it here Eric. Same as before we only need one node per cutting. So I like to cut just above the node, set it aside. For the sake of expediency when you're doing numerous cuttings it can help to break them down to size first and then cut the angles all at the same time. So those little pieces we're not using. You could put these in a pot or take them home and somewhere that they'll get more care those have a good chance of survival as well. Okay and then we have this one here. Is this usable? This is another one that you can see this has got new growth from this year and we really want the ones that are woody and lignified for live stakes. Those again could be used for growing in a pot at home or in a home garden that gets regular irrigation. So we got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven cuttings from that branch just like we were expecting. Take a look at these Eric. How do you feel? Is this a pretty ideal batch of cuttings? These all look fantastic. All right so now we have the cuttings and we could plant these directly into the ground but if we're not going to plant them right away now what? We can store them in a bucket of water for up to a week. So in this bucket how deep do we want them submerged? We want our elderberry cuttings to be anywhere from one third to halfway. We're going to go directly to planting these live stakes however we would love for you to reference the elderberry live staking guide to learn all about the most ideal locations to plant these. So Eric how do we go ahead live staking this elderberry? Well the first thing you're going to need is the right tools and for me the cream of the crop is this Japanese digging trowel known as a hori hori. I love these because they're pocket size, they're effective, allow you to plant in a variety of different soil types. Shovels and pickaxes are also readily available tools that you might already have on hand. If you don't have a hori hori though I highly recommend making the investment. Very nice okay let's go ahead and plant one. All right so first we make a small hole and of course depth. Depth is the important part so we have this cutting here that's about 10 inches and how deep of a hole have we made? We want to go about two thirds deep so that's just about perfect. But how about the placement of the node above or below the ground? The node always goes above the ground. And if there are multiple nodes on the cutting? It's ideal to have one above ground and one below ground. Okay so we've got our simple hole how do we fill this in? The first step is to add a little bit of extra water so that the soil is nice and juicy. Great. Give the plant an extra nudge off to an easy start. Wow I'm actually seeing how easily that hole is filling back in. And now do we want to really snugly pack it in or keep it loose? I like snug so I usually give a little press of my foot at the very end. When there's good soil contact that ensures that the cutting is not going to dry out underground even if there's a long period of drought. Now are we going straight into the ground at an angle? What's our preference here? I like to have a slight angle so that there's more soil contact underground. The strategy we're going to share with you is rather than just planting one cutting in each area because one cutting might produce but it could also die. So to increase our chances of success we're going to plant three in a small triangle approximately eight to nine inches apart. So that's the width between my pinky and thumb. Great. How is that all? Great. And then dump the water in. Before we take the last step I just want to share how incredibly enthusiastic I'm feeling. What we have here is the potential over the years ahead for dozens of pounds of fruit that's going to be for humans, for the birds. The flowers on this are going to be incredibly beneficial for many pollinators. This is helping to regenerate our soil. This is helping to create shade. It's helping to restore riparian areas. And once we've planted and there's fruit that's not the end of the story. As the birds and the animals eat these elderberries and spread them the trees will spread as well. So just getting started can actually start to produce many more trees without any work. The final touch. What are we doing here? We're going to give these some nice mulch to help to suppress weeds and retain the moisture from the watering that we just gave these cuttings. I'm excited. A whole bucket? No we can go like that. I'll do some more around these. Elderberries are very unique because with a lot of with most trees you don't want the mulch touching the base of the tree. But with elderberry they can have that right up around them right? Yeah because they'll just root into this nice composted wood chip that we've got for them. So here you have it. This is what we're ideally looking for for the likeliness of success. We've got our three planted snugly in there and then mulched as well. What do you think Eric? I think all three of these are gonna make it. Very nice. How are you feeling right now having planted these? Fantastic. I love elderberries. Well one million community fruit and nut trees over the next decade and right now I'm thinking maybe a quarter million of those are going to be elderberries and I'm hoping that that's going to be dozens or hundreds that are planted by you in this together. That gives you the information that you need in order to harvest, get your propagation materials and then actually live stake. However there's so much more helpful information to be deeply successful, to be able to plant dozens, hundreds, thousands of these. And for you we have created our elderberry live staking guide. Go to communityfruittrees.org and you'll have the guide there and everything that you need for support on this journey. All right let's get out there and propagate some elderberries.