From free moves this week up to the deep plays.
In June, look for flat creamy flower heads with a honey smell on a warm day. Strip the tiny flowers from the green stalks, steep with sugar, lemon, and a little citric acid, and bottle.
Pick on a dry day for the strongest scent, and do not rinse the flowers.
The wild yeast living on the petals will ferment a light, fizzy drink with almost no equipment. A flower head, sugar, water, lemon, and a few days.
Do not wash the flowers. The yeast you need lives on them.
In September, strip the ripe near-black berries off every green stalk and simmer them down with honey. The result is the traditional cold-season syrup.
Cooking is not optional. Raw berries and the green stalks are toxic.
In winter, take pencil-thick cuttings from dormant wood and push them two-thirds into the ground where you want the tree. They root and grow fast. A free hedge from a stick.
Take a few extra cuttings. Some will not take, and spares cost nothing.
The cordial and syrup market is real and sells every year. A few productive bushes can supply a stall, with the flower and the berry as two separate seasonal products.
Label each batch with its harvest month. Spring flower and autumn berry are different lines.