Planting an Elderberry Plant

Today I'm planting an elderberry in our small fruits garden. Elderberries or Sambucus canadensis are native to Oklahoma and much of North America. The fruits of the plant are often harvested from the wild and used to make jams, jellies, pies, juices, and even wine. Now the plant, unlike most of our small fruits, actually requires a bit of shade. While all the others we've put in full sun, elderberries will benefit from a little bit of shade, but you do want to choose a site that has good air circulation, which will help with limiting any foliar diseases. Elderberries are not entirely self-fruitful, which means to have the best fruit production you want to plant more than one cultivar. Some good cultivars for Oklahoma include Nova, York, Johns, and Adams. Now the cultivar I've selected here is called Black Lace and I was attracted to this one for ornamental characteristics rather than for the fruiting characteristics. It has some very beautiful deep black purplish foliage and it produces lovely creamy pink flowers which contrast nicely with the foliage in the springtime. Now of course those flowers are followed by berries and the berries are edible even though it's an ornamental plant. We already have a Nova and a York set out in our garden so I thought this darker foliage plant would make a nice trio with those. Now before we plant we need to prepare our elderberry and when we're planting we want to remove all the shoots. This one only has one large shoot. We want to remove those at a height of eight to ten inches. So I'm just going to cut it right off and if there are any damaged stems in here we'd also want to remove those as well. While I'm ready to set this in the ground we'll dig a hole for it. Elderberries grow quite large and they're going to require adequate spacing to accommodate their size. They can reach a height up to eight to ten feet and a width of six to eight feet. You want to space your plants a minimum of about eight feet apart. Now it's always a good idea as we're planting any plant to prepare our soil by mixing in a lot of organic matter. Okay I have a nice wide hole prepared here and I'm ready to set my plant. It's always a good idea to try to shake your plant out and not pull it out. I noticed when I was looking at this that there's some roots or stems. I think they're stems that went back and layered but they're wrapping around the base of the plant and these can end up girdling and killing the plant. So I'm just trimming those out so that they won't choke out the plant and kill the upper portions. There's one more over here on the back side. You can see that in there. So if you just cut it out on each end that'll prevent that from wrapping around and around the plant. The other thing we want to do is this has a nice dense root system but it's been in the pot for a while so I want to loosen up those roots and you can be a little bit rough with the plant. You want to make sure that these roots are going to grow down or out and not continue to circle. So go all the way around and loosen these up quite a bit. Sometimes if it's very dense you might get a knife or something and just cut some slits down the side every few inches. Okay now with the elderberry we want to set it slightly deeper than what we plant many of our other plants and you want the first branch to be either at the soil level or just below. So I'm going to go ahead and start filling this back in. This is where we want the final soil level to be just above this lowest branch here. Now elderberries are going to require a yearly fertilization applied in the springtime. For young plants just about one to two tablespoons of a nitrogen-rich fertilizer like urea or ammonium sulfate will be adequate. For older plants we want to add three to four tablespoons. You can also supply nitrogen by using compost or manure to provide it through organic matter such as we've done with this plant. As with any plant we always want to water it in very well when we're finished planting. Now elderberries require good irrigation. They're not drought tolerant and so you want to make sure that you keep them well watered and it's also a really good idea to mulch them and that'll help conserve the soil moisture. You can learn more about growing elderberries through OSU fact sheet 6256 growing elderberries in Oklahoma.