The Elderberry Order

Because several have asked, I ordered the elderberries from Stark Bros. Nursery. I ordered late on the evening of February 21 (Wednesday) and they were delivered on Saturday, the 24th. I’m impressed! The were very well packages with damp paper around the roots. This is the collection I ordered – it has a Johns and an Adams and I ordered three so I got three of each.  I also ordered two Nova and two York varieties. You do need at least two varieties because, from what I’ve read, elderberries are not totally self-pollinators.

Elderberries

You can see the 6 elderberries in the pots. They were much larger than I was expecting them to be. I’ve never seen an elderberry growing but I was expecting them to be smaller. They barely fit in those big pots.

I also ordered a few plants from Willis Orchard Co. on 2/21 and as far as I can tell, those have not been shipped yet

Depending on your climate, some are more cold tolerant than others. I read that but didn’t pay much attention because cold isn’t usually much of an issue for us.

We do expect the birds to be a problem with the berries so we’ll cover them with bird netting til we pick what we want, then we’ll uncover them and let the birds have what they want and hopefully spread the seeds around, though I doubt we ever get enough rain for them to grow wild here.

I think that’s all the questions I needed to answer. I don’t really know anything about elderberries except what I’ve read in the past few months. This site has some good information for anyone who wants to know more about growing them.