Two stories to share tonight. But first, as every article gets automatically sent out to newsletter subscribers, allow me to pause a moment and welcome 5 new subscribers to The Natural Health, God’s Way, newsletter! If you read my articles but are not yet a subscriber, you can join the list in the left-hand sidebar of each article you read. If you are using gmail, yahoo, hotmail, or AOL, be sure to whitelist bnhc@naturalhealthgodsway.ca to ensure you get every email!
The first story to share is about how our weekend just went! We attended the Vernon Wellness Fair Saturday and Sunday under my Biblical Natural Health Coaching banner, and while we were JUST shy of earning back the table fee, the conversations around the table were awesome! A number of those conversations led to either tea sales or prickly lettuce ACV tincture sales. One tea sold so well, that it led to my second story to share this evening.
This morning was our first official foraging run, and yes, immediately after a two-day fair meant we were kind of waking up on the trail, and not always with it while doing our errands afterwards. But we came home with a fair bit of nettle, and some catnip, both of which are included in the ingredient list of the tea we almost ran out of this weekend!
The patches we picked from today are growing quite well, and should be thick and tall very shortly! I forgot to take trail pics today, so here are pics of the trays we spread out after rinsing. Two trays are of the catnip, and the rest are all nettle.
At the barn this evening, we picked a small tray’s worth of yarrow, and more purple dead nettle. Currently, the purple dead nettle is for home use only, as we aren’t sure how they will or won’t grow around the barn property this year as to whether we’ll be able to harvest enough to include in the apothecary trunk or add to our tea line-up. We usually only see it in small patches where we live.
This week I need to get at our front “lawn” patch, start harvesting the dandelion, prickly lettuce, mustartd weed and Herb Sophia that’s now growing there. The broadleaf plantain is too small yet, haven’t seen signs of pineapple weed as of yet, and the horsetail is not growing yet either. Maybe by month-end, I can take photos to put together this year’s yard poster to put out on the front fence.
Foraging in early spring while tiny-home living, is always a bit of a nailbiter when it comes to drying the herbs. As usual, tonight is due for rain overnight and tomorrow morning. On top of that, our landlord is stopping by to figure out how to cut the hedge down to size and give it a trim as well. This means we can’t set up our folding table or our canopy, although those are needed for the end of May anyway and potentially for a few Saturdays in the summer too. So my daughter dug out her beach umbrella, we attached it to an old fence post, tied that to two places on the RV, put a couple 20 lb bricks at the base with a string to pull against the other two ties, and most of our haul is now under this umbrella. We are going to pile the trays further under the umbrella before we retire for the night, and we’ll see how they did in the morning. Sometimes our best efforts to keep things dry in the spring still end up being lost to moisture, but we’ll see how this haul does. Between the teas we need to blend up more of, and a new tea that was added to the lineup this year, we have a bigger need for catnip than we used to, so we can’t really afford to lose this first harvest. We’ll see how things go.
Bonus story: Fall 2022/Winter 2023, we’d gathered three very stuffed large paper double-walled yard waste bags with curly dock seeds. We kept getting sidetracked from dealing with them, so they sat in the cooking shelter for the better part of the past year.
Today, we put in an afternoon finishing off stripping stalks of seeds, and filled both a large former laundry soap tub (rinsed in the past already, don’t worry), AND all the way up the dotted full line of one of these yard waste bags, with JUST the seeds with their husks still on!
That is step one of processing curly dock seeds. Step two will involve prepping the seeds for roasting. This involves putting the seeds into either a food processor or blender to crack the seeds and break up the husks. This often means finding twigs that fell into the seeds and separating those out. Once that first round of crushing is done, they go onto trays into the oven to be roasted, then as each tray cools, it goes back into the blender for more crushing. 
I use the small blender cup for this, because it allows for a more thorough crushing to happen, and a finer flour. I will sift the flour, and throw what doesn’t go through the sifter back into the blender cup with more seed and keep doing this till all trays have gone through the oven.
I didn’t know we’d brought home enough raw seed to fill a large paper yard waste bag!!! These next two steps are going to take awhile!
