So today’s foraging run was supposed to have been cancelled due to largely having run out of space to dry stuff at home! Then we attended the May 25th fair down in Kettle Valley, and discovered that to replenish some of our teas before June 9th’s wellness fair at the Laurel, we’d run out of Pasture Sage! We did VERY well at the Kettle Valley event! So we couldn’t let this week go by without seeing if we could find any Pasture Sage in one of our foraging zones where we know it grows.
While the sage is indeed growing, a lot of it is maybe 4 to 8″ tall right now. Some plants were larger, but most were around that size. We brought home some sage, but not as much as we can if we are picking later in the summer. So here’s hoping we have enough dried and ready to blend before June 9th!
We also gathered a little tarragon. It’s growing better than the sage right now, FAR better! This pic is of a young tarragon plant. Ashley is going to see how it turns out if mascerated for aromatic use, so we didn’t grab a lot, just enough for that experiment.
We gathered more yarrow, which is growing very well right now anywhere we go! A fair bit of it was second year at the zone we went to today. Lot’s of white flowers everywhere! This gets used for teas and medicines around the house, for Ashley’s horse, as well as in tea blends that we sell. So we can never have enough yarrow. We go through it.
Ashley wants to experiment with making Arrowleaf Balsamroot oil from the seeds, so we grabbed a few seed heads here and there whenever a plant hadn’t already shed them. They seriously look like miniature sunflower seeds, and while the flavour is nice, it is different from sunflower seeds. The bag however, began to increasingly smell like the flower with it’s vanilla/sweet chocolate type smell.
We got so much rain the past week, that we lost some of the Crane’s Bill and pineapple weed harvest, so we picked more of those. Back at the barn to do horse chores, there was more pineapple weed to gather, as well as Pennycress, a bit of Herb Sophia,and a bit of prickly lettuce. Introduced the barn owner to the flavour of pineapple weed.
We are due for more rain this week and then it’s supposed to get warm again. So hopefully we don’t lose anymore of what we’re harvesting.
A fun photo set –
Back in the fall, we’d come across this fallen tree whose branches appeared to make what look like a storybook portal “to the other side”. Today, we saw the same “portal”, and had to take another photo. Here is the portal in both seasons, slightly different camera angles, and some of the dead branches have shifted, but otherwise, still a “portal to the other side”.
