Elderberry flowers are something I absolutely adore, the beautiful small white flowers, although don’t seem like it, carry loads of taste and are a great ingredient to make syrup, cordial, or even jam. Elderberry fruits are also excellent, but the birds also love them so I never get the chance to harvest any berries. This is why I always harvest only the flowers. 

Flower harvest is fairly easy, branches are delicate enough to be able to tear them off with hands, so harvest can be done quickly. Especially if the elderberry is kept as a bush. Just a couple of flowers are enough to make delicious stuff. I used to make lots of elderflower syrup, but lately, I don’t drink anything sweet. This is why I still have a bunch of bottles left from last year’s harvest, so this year I decided to do something different and dry the flowers for tea. 

Drying flowers for tea is basically the same as drying any other plant to use as tea. The flowers, once harvested, should be placed in a dry and dark room and left to completely dry. Once dried the flowers are taken down from the stem and saved in a jar or left as small clusters that can be placed directly in the cup and poured with boiling water. 10 minutes later the tea will be ready.

The only real difference between harvesting flowers for tea and flowers for syrup is that the tea flowers shouldn’t be harvested once they are older. Older flowers tend to release pollen all over the place. I had occasions when I was covered in yellow pollen while harvesting. In syrup, this doesn’t matter since the pollen will stay in the water and will be a part of the syrup, while in tea the pollen will be lost during the drying process. This is why it’s better to collect flowers that have fully opened but haven’t still started releasing pollen like mad. 

I have a big elder bush in the side yard which grew here by accident. There’s a big elderberry tree in the forest next to our yard and over the years I’ve harvested the flowers there, then one year I’ve noticed that there is a small elderberry branch growing next to our fence. I left it there, trimmed the branches to make it grow as a bush and now 10 years later I have a fully grown bush. The first big harvest on this bush was 5 years ago, and since then I’ve been harvesting it every year.

 Since this year I’ll be making tea I’m harvesting my elderflowers every couple of days. Just as there are a dozen flowers opened I cut them down and prepare them for drying. The balcony has been really warm lately so I decided to use it as a drying room. The temperature is high enough for quick drying and since I have bamboo panels that I can close, the drying spot is sun free during the whole day.

The flowers dry pretty fast this way and I can dry more flowers in just a couple of days. Once the flowers are almost fully dry I take the flowers off the stems and place them in a plastic bag to fully dry. I will store them later in jars to prevent the moisture from ruining them, and I’ll keep the jars in the basement. My hubby built me lots of new shelves in the basement, so now I can fill them up with lots of dried goodies. I’m sure we’ll enjoy the elderflower tea as much as we enjoy the syrup.