Please, keep us updated on your arctic raspberries on productivity, size, taste, etc 
!!
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i almost got the evans instead of the lutowka rose cherry. all my romance and monty cherries are loaded this year at age 4. consorts are a older cultivar so only good for processing. i have tiben which is a much bigger and sweeter berry. ive heard good things about titania also. i also have a crandal clove currant. just starting to bloom now. not as vigourous grower like the R. nigrums but have a good sized sweet berry and very drought tolerant. going to be a good season this year. looks like youre going to have one also. the arctics are in full bloom now. a carpet of purple. now if they can give me some fruit that would be nice. 
just put in some plugs last summer i grew from seed of rodluvan strawberry. its a swedish cross of f. vesca and f. virginiana. has bigger berries than the alpine and wood land strawberry. it was bred for flavor and production in the specialty market kind of like mara des bois. should get my 1st berries soon.
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Be sure to mulch and protect it! Mine didnāt survive the winter. I wish I did more to protect it- all that time spent nurturing the things from seed was a huge pain only to have the cold winter finish it off for me. I had a whole strawberry mound and the whole thing is dead. We did have a melt and then a cold snap so I wonder if that killed the strawberries off.
I just pulled out my elderberries. They were either dead or struggling to bud out with one leaf. No point in trying to experiment with those when I could plant more honeyberries, saskatoons, currants, or gooseberries.
There are some prolific Alaska hardy red elderberry. You see them along the roadways in certain parts. I think only the waxwings eat the fruit and they are generally seen as a weed and not a plant you would want to cultivate. Itās a shame that regular commercial cultivars donāt do better up here.
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my Rodluvan were planted out last spring from plugs i grew out in my grow room over the winter of 19ā-20ā, so they were well established before winter hit. had snow over them all winter. we have the rad mulberry wild here as well. i have 2 on my property. i believe JessieS on here harvests them. they are kind of small. i have a wild elder i found growing on a woods road in the Allagash. its at least z3 hardy. if your interested i have some cuttings rooted of it i could send you to try. its not as productive as the commercial ones but 1 bush is enough elder for me and the bush isnt as big so doesnt take up as much space. ive never fertilized it and it gives me good fruit.i also have a few rodluvan plugs left i could throw in with it. its always a struggle to find good fruit hardy enough to grow in the north but on the positive side there are more hardier cultivars coming out all the time.
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Sure, I would love to try elderberry again! It sounds perfect. The strawberry will be nice too- my raised bed strawberry patch is turning into a grass patch. Will be nice to try that again.
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Here is an update-
American cranberryā> supposed to be impossibly cold hardy, and maybe it is, but this last winter seems to have done it in. Everything above ground died and the bark split apart. It is growing back from the roots but after three years of babying this plant, I think Iāll replace with a honeyberry.
Hardy kiwiā> not hardy. They didnāt survive the winter. The vines all split and cracked apart. I have a friend who had a couple large hardy kiwi (5+ years old) and they were growing up a tree and those all died. Iām not sure what it was about this winter, but Iāve never seen the bark just split open.
Arctic kiwiā> doing great. They live up to their name.
Cranberry-
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I see the dandelions, horse tails, and the fireweed are doing pretty awesome 
I donāt know, I would not read too much into a single failure. Heck my second attempt at an evans cherry seems to be deadā¦ and yet I have seen too many full grown evans around, in areas much colder than mine.
The Romeo that had the heart attack last year (died to the ground) and about 40% dead this year, I donāt think that it was winter damage. What greened up did not have any damage whatsoever, from base to tip. It is putting strong growth so I think it will eventually sort itself out.
I lost a kinnickinnick (bear berry) and that mofo was a native plant.
I Think my Lapins cherry is dead but that one was always a bad choice for Alaska, every year it was dying a bit more from honest cold damage.
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If I did it all over again I would only do currants and honeyberries.
Saskatoon berry- Forget it. Iām going to rip mine out and throw them in the compost. The moose love to eat them. If you somehow get past the moose then you might get some sort of worm infecting the fruit. If itās not the worm, then itās some strange fungus covering the plant and taking out the fruit. Smokey and honeywood seem to be the most infected. I lost one JB30 this past winter (snapped at the base from the weight of the snow), and the other JB30 looks the most resistant. Overall, these have been a waste of time, space, and effort compared to honeyberries. @don1357 you want three Saskatoon bushes?
Jostaberry- waste of time / space
Gooseberry- If you are limited for space then skip these. They grow really well, but you donāt get a lot of fruit (relative to the space they take up) and I wish I would have planted more honeyberries instead.
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We are spoiled up here where we donāt have to spray most things. In many places in the lower 48 (most places?) You would not get any fruit if you donāt do several applications of different things. To them dealing with your Saskatoon issues would be par for the course. I sprayed mine with Permethrin after petal drop, it took care of the curculio worms.
I have a lifetime supply of that stuff, it was cheaper in volume and I didnāt realize how little you actually use. If you need any let me know.
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some years i get that issue on my wild serviceberry but so far nothings touched my Northline other than some leaf bites. i grafted 1 limb on my wild one to Northline. its put out 5ft of growth since late April. going to graft the other next year although i got some nice sized fruit off the wild branch and still ripening fruit. this is a 20ft long tree growing out of my spruce privacy hedge. never fertilized or watered and is in mostly shade until about 6pm. my Jeanne gooseberry is laying on the ground with so much fruit right now. its a very heavy producer. remind me in the fall and ill send you some cuttings to try. they root so easily once they touch the ground that 1 bushbecame a 6ā x 6ā hedge of them.
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Are there any grape cultivars that both have nice tasting grapes and that would survive USDA zone 3 (or at least 4a)?
I had a Somerset Seedless when I was living in Helsinki (in Southern Finland, more like USDA zone 5a), and it is the only hardy grape cultivar whose grapes I have tasted and actually enjoyed. Hazaine Sladkii and Zilga grapes you can eat a little to show to others that you are eating grapes you have grown yourself. I usually tasted a few of those and let a bucketfull spoil. I suppose they were bred to make grape-based moonshine or something.
A friend tried Somerset Seedless here in Lapua. It made through something like three mild winters with some protection but then came a cold winter with a cold spell of about a week of temperatures day and night (in January sun rises about half past nine a.m. and sets about half past three p.m. and does not rise high, so the warming effect is not big) continuously below -30Ā°C (-22 Ā°F) and down to -35Ā°C (-31Ā°F) and the Somerset Seedless died despite all the mulch and such. Is there anything that would taste as nice as Somerset Seedless but tolerate cold winters better?
My saskatoon has been perfectly healthy here in Finland. Perhaps it helps that the native range and adapted pests are far away. My main complaint about saskatoon/serviceberries is that at least the Martin cultivar berries only taste like rowan berries. They are not as bitter and sour as rowan berries but otherwise they taste almost exactly the same as rowan berries. None of the taste descriptions ever mention this, though I suspect that the taste is shared by all cultivars since at least in Martin there is no other taste. I like the taste of bird-cherries (Prunus padus) more. I was planning to plant more saskatoon but scrapped the plan after I first tasted the berries.
i dont know if you can get northline there but its flavor is very good and lots of hectares of it growing in Canada. i also grow jb30 and smokey which are very good as well. maybe you got alot of rain as your fruit were ripening, washing out the sweetness?
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