AdAgrA 2019: True Success

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Seminar 5

Renee Vandenberg

Elderberry Production

Good morning again, my name is Renee Vandenberg.

We own and operate a certified organic farm.

We currently have a small acreage, about a quarter of an acre dedicated to elderberries.

But if you have any kind of acreage at all 1 elderberry bush 1020 elderberry bushes makes a lot of berries the reason we do it is for health benefits and What you're going to learn today is how to propagate by cutting and rooting Growing the site selection how to plant Harvesting preserving canning and freezing.

How many of you guys here have farms, have acreage?

If you're gonna plant some elderberries, Some people just want beautiful, edible bushes in their yard, and that can be a great reason.

Somebody wants to make enough production for their own family.

We have enough bushes that we produce enough juice for our family and our church.

In 1 year, we get about enough for 2 years of service to our friends.

So now we are going to be selling a little bit.

We have a little roadside stand by our farm where we sell asparagus and a couple other things, and we're going to be adding elderberry to that.

But think about your goals, and as you have your goals figured out, you can figure out your site selection.

If you have a yard, you can find a place in your yard where you can plant an elderberry bush.

It is best if you have 2 of them, although they are self-pollinating, most of the varieties are.

So it's not absolutely necessary to have 2, but it would be better for pollination and for larger berries.

This is the first place where I planted elderberries, and I have 15 bushes in an area probably from here to the end of the wall, and That is way too many.

They go in and they're this big, and you put them 5 feet apart, 4 feet apart, and you're like, oh, I can get more in there, and then they grow.

And that's my biggest problem with everything, anything in my garden, I have always forgot that things grow and get big.

So they intertwined and I had 2 different varieties there.

I had Johns and I had Wildwood and Adams.

And so now I have no idea which is which because they root or go out from rhizomes and they come up and so just completely intertwined.

It's very, very hard to pick the elderberries here because the stuff to the right is Raspberries and the raspberries have actually gone in and they're really pokey So it's real hard to get on that side and the other side is the asparagus so the ferns have fallen over So these have gotten the row is at least 7 feet wide.

So you need to really do a good job on figuring out site selection.

This is the second place that I planted elderberries, and I was gonna make sure that time I got them far enough apart, which I did, but then they haven't grown together very well.

This is a part of the rest of my garden, and that's a hayfield on the other side.

It's a little too far apart, so there isn't like an area here where it's good for production.

The problem with this, on this garden, is it's on the north side, excuse me, on the west side.

So as the elderberries get to be 6 or 8 feet tall, they're going to shade out my garden.

So you have to look for a couple hours of the day anyway.

So you want to look and get a real nice place.

I call that my kneeling garden because everything I do in there is on my knees, and every time I'm down there, that's like when I'm really thinking about God.

My standing gardens, I just look at how beautiful everything is and it makes me think of the Lord, but the kneeling garden, when I'm down on my hands and knees with my fingers in the dirt, that's when I really feel the closest gardening with God.

We can't get in there real easily with our machinery.

So my husband said I could have it because he doesn't want it.

And when we planted these, I'll go a little more into planting later, we made nice big holes, put lots of organic compost into there.

When we had our manure pit dug, when we had, we had cows up until 2005, but when they did dig our manure pit, we had a lot of clay that they didn't know where to go with, and manure pits, it is about 200 feet by 200 feet by 20 feet deep, so that was a lot of dirt we had to find a place for.

It's now producing, after 20 years, it's producing fairly well, but still not up to the rest of the farm and that's 1 of the reasons why we chose this place.

They don't demand a lot of care and they don't demand a lot of fertilizer.

If you wanna make sure your soil's balanced, but if they get what they need, they'll really produce well, but they're not like things that require more.

When you're propagating, you wanna decide if you wanna go with hardwood cuttings or greenwood cuttings.

We do greenwood cuttings in the summer because they're easier to propagate the rid a lot better The it's green and growing and they seem to just kind of take off This is a hardwood cutting.

Hardwood cuttings can be taken in the winter.

They can be shipped, they can be mailed, they can be kept in the refrigerator.

As long as you don't get them warm, they won't sprout.

But as you guys go around, just take a look at these and You'll see that these are about to bud stage.

We'll go out, and he had to take the chainsaw on a couple of them.

I'm so afraid of pruning that I actually left my elderberries go for 4 years.

And I got a stump that was about this big, and I got plants that were like 14 feet tall, and I was so thrilled, I thought I was gonna get so many elderberries that year.

But the plant put all the energy into growing that wood, and it didn't grow very many berries for me.

And after that, I had to remember, just don't be afraid, cut them down, they'll come back.

But this is how we gather the sticks we go out in the winter when the plant is completely dormant And I don't know if you can Really see here the big Actually, it's back in there the really really big stump that we took out.

Elderberry is most productive on second and third year wood.

So what you do is after it's, It'll get, it's 1 plant in the middle, it'll start to make shoots that'll come up.

The first wood, as you're looking at these as they go around, this is probably only two-year-old wood.

This, the little ones you'll see, is gonna be one-year-old wood.

Sometimes you'll get them, I had a special 1 here that was hollow, it's probably going around.

As you look at the end, if you find a hollow 1, those are ones you don't want to use.

I think you can even see the hollowness on this 1.

That's just not going to have enough nutrition.

The question is, do you need to do any propagation if you're going to have 1 in your yard?

The answer to that is no, you don't need to propagate but you do need to prune.

So if you can find someone who wants your sticks, that's a great use of them.

But as you go through your sticks, you need to be very careful to pick out ones that are going to be viable.

We gather the sticks in the house and the garage.

We'll go through them and we'll pull off all the dead ones and those we put in the wood burner.

The rest of them we'll take into the house.

The good, long, straight ones are the ones that seem to propagate a little bit better.

If you'll see the ones you're looking at now, they'll have little buds on them and they're going to feel a little bit swollen.

They came on the airplane, they were in the hotel room.

Normally I would have kept them frozen and cold or at least in the refrigerator, but now with all this travel they've kind of come to bud swell stage.

But after we cut out the bad ones, the dead ones, oh yeah, and don't play dead sticks.

The first year I did this, I cut all those bushes down and I planted about 150 of them and they were all off of dead sticks, and I didn't know you were supposed to look for the green.

Rick Westermeyer

Seven Steps to Creating Beauty

You know, in many ways, creating beauty is sort of esoteric, maybe sometimes on our minds, not as an essential part of the simple agricultural gardening lifestyle.

But, you know, for my personal feeling, I don't know why each of you are here.

1 question I'd like to answer, we could ask you all, but I'm going to guess it's because God created in you the desire for beauty.

And in Ecclesiastics it says, God makes all things beautiful in their time.

And that also that he has placed eternity within the heart of man.

And so you are created with appreciation from a God who loved beauty and created beauty at the very beginning of the world.

And he wants to make all things beautiful, not just landscapes and our gardens.

He wants beautiful relationships, beautiful music, beautiful homes, beautiful lives.

And so, you know, it's part of a life of beauty.

And I really think that, you know, when you think of all the compelling reasons for there being a creator God, You know, in science, which I'm heavily into, you know, there's all this complexities of the human body and the irreducible complexities you hear about that says, you know, we must have a creator God.

But I really think the presence of beauty in the world, the beautiful sights that we see that have been created, that evolutionary thought really has a really tough time, you know, explaining the beauty that we see us around in the world.

And I think that's the fingerprint of God in the world.

And I think within your own hearts, you have that desire to create beauty that came directly from the creator.

Well, I would like to spend a little bit of time talking about these 7 steps towards creating beauty.

And you'll get these 7 steps and a few of the questions that I've asked.

I think that, You know, the only pictures that we have of the Garden of Eden are artist's renditions of what they think it might have looked like.

And you know, this is Nathan Green's viewpoint.

You know, he's mixed, if you're into international flora and fauna and so forth, he's mixed South American spoonbills and African lions and a waterfall from Oregon and porpoise.

I mean, he's got the whole world there kind of in 1 picture.

And I don't know what it looked like, But I do know that it was very beautiful.

And Ellen White says it was exceedingly beautiful, probably beyond anything that various artists would have come up with that the Garden of Eden looks like.

And so, you know, this first step towards creativity is something that you don't have to work on because God has put it in your heart, okay?

God created us in his image, men and women, with the desire to be creative and to reproduce and to tend what he created and even make it more beautiful.

I mean, he actually, Ellen White says, gave us the role of building our homes from the vines of beautiful flowering branches and he gave us the ability to create our own beautiful space.

So, you know, things that I share with you are not, you know, they're things that might reflect my sense of beauty, but, you know, really, when you leave this, it's gonna be about creating your sense of what is beautiful and what God has created in your heart.

As the earth came forth from the hand of the maker, it was exceedingly beautiful.

The surface was diversified with mountains and hills and plains interspersed with noble rivers and lovely lakes.

Graceful shrubs and delicate flowers greeted the eye at every turn.

The entire landscape outvied in beauty the decorated grounds of the proudest palace.

The angel, Ali Close, viewed the scene with delight and rejoiced at the wonderful works of God.

So that is what God created us into and created for us to do.

I mean, In Genesis 2, I mean, this was the first work of man, that God gave man.

Most of you would not realize that in Genesis 2, the very next profession that was mentioned in the Bible, and people are just kind of shocked when I say this, but the very next thing that could be considered a profession on earth was that God said that he caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam.

And so there's the first Anesthesiologist right there.

And in fact, in Daniel chapter 12, where Daniel talks about there's gonna be a time, and then that day, Michael, she'll stand up and there'll be a time of trouble such as never was from the beginning of the earth.

And then he says, in multitudes that sleep in the dust of the earth will be raised, some to righteousness and some to everlasting shame.

You know, to me, you know, as an anesthesiologist, I mean, we're not really about putting people to sleep.

I mean, people think that's what it's about.

You know, people say, oh, just knock me out.

You know, honestly, 1 of my partners once said to someone that just was flippant, like, you know, just put me to sleep.

Don't worry about the fact that I have a 99% stenosis of my coronary artery and I've got a carotid stenosis, and I'm 1 heartbeat away from dying.

And he said to them, anesthesiology is not about putting people to sleep.

I mean, much of what I do, you know, after 25, 000 times of doing this, I can do very safely and quickly and almost, you know, I'm thinking about my garden while I'm doing it.

But I always live in the fear of waking people up.

And there at the end of the world, what is God gonna do?

So, I mean, it's just an amazing picture.

And to me, that's kind of the anesthetic triumph of the ages, waking people up out of the dust of the earth.

Here's to me an important step in creating beauty.

I used to try to put 5 or 7 different kinds of plants together and try to get them all to bloom at the same time.

You know, now I'm really looking for 2 or 3 things that are harmonious, that blend together, that's just simple and easy.

And, you know, this is from this summer, you know, off our deck.

And to me, just 2 or 3 things that are very simple.

There's my grandson helping me water out of his wading pool.

You know, just simple things can be beautiful.

They don't require a lot of complexity and Intricacy.

This is on your handout, you know, that I've wanted you to ask yourself in each 1 of these steps.

Can I create a simple yet beautiful landscape?

Should I take a minimalistic approach to landscaping and gardening?

I love that the younger generation, and many of you in this room have embraced this idea of minimalism and living a simple life.

I mean, I think that that is just absolutely wonderful.

My daughters and my son-in-laws are really into that.

And I am totally sympathetic to people that have lost their home, like in paradise and so forth.

But we tried to live a really simple lifestyle and we didn't get power boats, we got a canoe, and we didn't get downhill skis, we got cross-country skis, but over 25 years, you just end up accumulating a lot of stuff even when you're trying to live a simple life.

And my wife and I have kind of looked at the valley below us and we've said, you know, boy, wouldn't it be the easiest way of downsizing for just a fire to just come sweeping up this valley?

And, you know, we would just start off and we would be more minimalist.

I can tell you, if we were starting over, we'd have a smaller house and we would have less stuff and we would do things more simply.

What will the plants that I choose require excessive upkeep?

I mean, many of us are not able to spend, we're not full time out there.

I gotta try to keep it simple in terms of what can be maintained and what can't be.

I think you need to ask yourself that question.

And my wife, if she were here, she would say, you know, oh, come on, Rick, am I careful not to take on more maintenance than I can reasonably can be competed in amount of time.

And I think that you do need to really try to not take on more than you are able to maintain and keep appropriate.

And that's a real tough thing for us that have creative energies that God has put in us, and we always want to do more and more.

And we just kind of extend ourself into beyond what we're able to keep up.

This is a farm only an hour away from here.

How would you like to be living in this farm at the foot of Mount Adams?

My last picture is going to be from near here, and for those of you that are young or old that are looking for a place to, you know, find a homestead, you know, There's still inexpensive land out in this area, and my son-in-law and daughter-in-law are actually already looking for land out there, and it's just gorgeous.

I mean, it's not a simple house necessarily, but their landscaping approach was very simple.

Jeff Birth

Minimum Till Market Gardening Methods

Father God, thank you very much for the chance to be at this conference.

Thank you for what we're learning about agriculture and how it pertains to your work.

Thank you for all the resources that we have available here and all the information that you have provided through Ad Agra.

Be with us now as we study another topic.

I pray that it will glorify you and what we discuss.

And I just pray that we would all seek your will and what we do in Jesus' name.

What I'm going to share today is a system that we've implemented for various reasons that I was able to learn about a couple of years ago now, just about 2 years ago.

And I think it aligns with the natural systems that God's put in place, or I wouldn't be here telling you about it.

And I think it will help alleviate some problems that we might have with some other systems.

I call it minimum till for problem solving and sustainability.

Now, I almost didn't put that word sustainability on there.

It's kind of a cliché-ish word lately and I tend to not like that.

So the definition here, 1 of the definitions of the word sustainability means able to be maintained.

And what we encountered on our farm was it was difficult to maintain a system, well, the first year we started, we tilled everything up and picked rocks and cleared brush and then we planted seeds and we irrigated with rain bird irrigation and we grew a lot of weeds that year.

It didn't matter how many students and how much time, we couldn't keep up with it.

And of course, you know, a lot of students never weeded before so they might not get very far in the amount of time that we had.

And so no matter how much training we had, it wasn't sustainable.

And so we've implemented drip irrigation, and I started looking for other systems that would function and still align with the systems that God put in place.

So that's why I use that word, so forgive me.

This is a neat story from the pre-Avondale days and I'll just read it here for you guys.

The Creator's interested in us knowing the science of the soil, I believe, and I think this represents that.

Before I visited Quirinbong, the Lord gave me a dream.

In my dream, I was taken to the land that was for sale in Quirinbong.

And I'm probably saying that wrong if there's any Aussies here, I'm sorry.

In my dream, I was taken, excuse me, several of our brethren had been solicited to visit the land, and I dreamed that I was walking upon the ground.

I came to a neat cut furrow that had been plowed 1 quarter of a yard deep and 2 yards in length.

2 of the brethren who had been acquainted with the rich soil of Iowa were standing before this furrow and saying, this is not good land, this soil is not favorable." And I'll come back to that in a minute.

But 1 who has often spoken in counsel was present also and he said, false witness has been born of this land.

Then he described the properties of the different layers of the earth.

He explained the science of the soil and said that this land was adapted to the growth of fruit and vegetables and that if well worked, it would produce its treasures for the benefit of man.

This dream I related to brother and sister Star and my family.

The next day we were on the cars on our way to meet the others who were investigating the land.

And as I was afterward walking on the ground where the trees had been removed, lo, there was a furrow just as I had described it, and the men also who had criticized the appearance of the land.

And the words were spoken just as I had dreamed." And then it goes on to tell how she told them of this dream and said, no, no, I think we have it wrong.

Now incidentally, I grew up in northeast Iowa on a corn and soybean farm, and the dirt in Iowa is black.

And here in Oregon, the soil, like in the Willamette Valley, is very good.

Down at Milo, where we're at, there's a lot of clay.

And it's a river bottom area, so there's a lot of rocks.

And you can't depend on 10 feet over from the spot you're standing on to grow the same as it does here.

And people say, oh this is such good land and I'm thinking, You haven't seen Iowa soil.

So I probably would have said something like this.

Back to Menu

Series

Seminar 5

Growing Through the Winter

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

Elderberry Production

38m

Seven Steps to Creating Beauty

38m

Minimum Till Market Gardening Methods

1h 1m

Growing Through the Winter

51m

Irrigation for the Market Gardener

40m

Sound Doctrine