We did not thrive in that subdivision. The elderberry tree did.
That's the whole irony of this story, really — about eighteen months in a cookie-cutter neighborhood in Pea Ridge that never quite felt like home, and the one thing that took root and flourished was a tree we planted almost as an afterthought. Everything else about that chapter of our life felt like we were holding our breath. The elderberry did not get that memo.
While he was doing some final landscaping on the house, my husband sent me a picture of two huge branches on the elderberry tree with a simple suggestion: "You should propagate these." Just like that. Like it was an easy, obvious thing. Like I had any idea what I was doing. I mean, I did propagate 10 comfrey into 54 plants, so maybe I do know what I'm doing? Or at least, have him fooled into believing I do?
What he did not send me was a follow-up text saying he'd actually gone and cut them off. I found that out when he walked in the door with two enormous branches and set them down on my kitchen counter like a very confident golden retriever bringing me a stick I never asked for. And then — this is the important part — he walked away. Because propagating elderberry branches was not on his schedule that day. It was, apparently, now on mine.
He came back into the kitchen a few minutes later to find me furiously staring at my phone like it held the map to the Holy Grail, googling "how to propagate elderberry" like my life depended on it. Between the two of us we got the first few cuttings figured out — cut here, strip that — and then Brent wandered off again to do Brent things, and I finished the job solo.
And Google would not let up. Every article, every YouTube video, all of them practically shouting at me: get these in soil now, the longer they sit out, the more moisture they lose, you're running out of time. Meanwhile I'm standing at my counter with a granite backsplash and a mildly panicked expression, suddenly moving with the urgency of someone who believes, deeply and incorrectly, that a stick is about to die in her hands.
I cut, I stripped, I potted. Nine cuttings made it into soil that day — filling every spare pot, cup, and container I could find in the greenhouse, because apparently we don't buy propagation trays like normal homesteaders (I really didn't know there was a thing called "propagation trays"). The dirt itself deserves its own paragraph: what we lovingly call "poop dirt," composted for years by the previous owners in the pasture where they kept their cow. Nutrient-rich doesn't begin to cover it. Google, of course, insisted the pots should live inside for the first few weeks. Google has clearly never met poop dirt. I was not bringing bug-riddled cow compost into my house for anyone, so outside on the porch they stayed, Google's opinion be damned.
Four more cuttings didn't have a proper home yet — those were the very first ones we did, before we'd fully figured out what we were doing, so we tucked them in a wet paper towel in the crisper drawer instead. Google's verdict: not ideal, but salvageable. Try again in January or February. So that's the plan. Ask me again in February how confident I feel about that.
Brent, surveying the operation, delivered the only appropriate response: "We don't need 54 plants." A direct callback to my comfrey era, when a few plants became approximately a small forest. He's not wrong to worry. I have a track record.
But there's something genuinely funny about the whole thing — the tree that thrived when we didn't, coming with us anyway, one rooted cutting at a time. We didn't plan this. Nobody wrote this into the homestead vision board... to be honest, I don't even have a vision board. It was a text with a photo, two branches on a counter, and a husband with a suggestion he had zero intention of executing himself, because he knew better than to get in my way.
Nine pots are sitting on the porch now, leafing out green and hopeful, under the watchful supervision of a dog who contributed nothing but moral support. Four more are biding their time in the fridge. Whether any of them make it is genuinely unknown — I am not a propagation expert, I am a woman who got mildly bullied by Google. But if even half of them take, we'll have living, thriving pieces of a place that didn't quite work out for us, growing somewhere that finally does.
More updates when the crisper drawer four make their debut. Assuming I remember they're in there.