Summer Activities & Fall Harvest at Elderberry Wisdom Farm

Joaquin Ocana

Native Plant Nursery Coordinator

The last few months have been some of the most exciting and eventful of the year! Some of our summer cohort loved it so much here that they agreed to extend their internship through September. They continued to learn how we integrate TEK into conservation practices and have gone on to do the awesome things they are doing out in the world. We are really grateful for all the amazing work and energy they contributed. Working with them, we built 10 sixteen – eighteen foot recessed wooden beds for our native plant nursery. We added cardboard, mulch and pallets underneath over 1500 containerized native plants. We also began pressing our elderberry syrup.  It is now October and we are continuing a lot of the work that began over the summer.  

Photo of EWF Summer 2025 Interns

Our biggest focus with our new cohort of fall interns has been to set and fill the 10 recessed beds in our upper plant nursery. We have had our fair share of hiccups or bumps in the road through the process from learning to use heavy equipment, discovering ground wasp nests, dealing with dust and dirt and mud, it has been a humbling experience to try and manage and direct this project on my end. Regardless, we have almost accomplished this project one step at a time.  

The change in seasons has also been marked by a lot of gifts from the plants. Our four fall interns spend their first week collecting Oregon white oak acorns around the farm, looking carefully for the most hearty and heathy. They helped harvest the last of our veggies, the Three Sisters, Gravenstein apples, and even helped Oregon Garden in Silverton harvest wapato bulbs. These last few weeks the leaves have changed, the rain and wind have come, and there’s a new feeling here. It’s been very exciting for me to connect more with the plants through our work and to feel just a bit more in tune with how they are transitioning into this wetter season. I’m looking forward to the next few weeks and to awesome fall and winter days working in our native plant nursery.