Foraging, Tea Sales, and Long-term Conundrum – Biblical Natural Health Coaching

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Sitting here exhausted, but very pleased with today’s foraging run! We visited two zones today, both public access, and brought home over 20 pounds of foraged herb! Three of those herbs are integral to the tea business: nettle, alfalfa, and catnip. Of those three, the alfalfa is now closest to the goal of two tubs heading into the fall fair season. The nettle is just over half a tub, but the catnip is quite low! Fortunately, it is only heavily used in two of the four teas it shows up in, and of those, one is not normally a frequently seller.

We went back to check on some wild raspberry bushes that we’d trimmed back earlier in the spring, and found them having perked up and growing well. Only one lost this year’s canes, but is growing new canes. We gathered more raspberry leaf while we were there.

The highlight of today’s outing was actually catching harvest season for the wild strawberry for the first time in years! Where we live, wild strawberries are extremely small compared to their domestic counterparts, but their flavour is so strong i nickname them tiny little flavour bombs! They make domestic strawberries taste bland by comparison.

We picked a decent handful by the time we left the area, but had nowhere to store them. I cleaned out a former home-made fly spray bottle (edible ingredients were used for the spray), and we carried them home in that. We look forward to enjoying them!

We did some more exploring in the general area, and found several major patches of canada thistle, which is now in bud. Ashley donned the gloves and began picking. We use canada thistle leaves as the base of one of our teas, and the buds last year, were discovered to make a very nice wild artichoke dip, something we will be making at the thistle workshop a week from this Saturday. Registration closed for this event already. Deadlines are necessary so we don’t run ourselves off our feet.

Mullein was growing, and we identified Self-Heal growing in the area too and gathered some of that.

At the second zone, we picked more closed pine cones for this year’s attempts at making pine mugolio. We grabbed today’s alfalfa, catnip and nettle hauls from this second location across a roughly 1 km stretch of trail. Peppergrass was also available, so we grabbed more of that.

By the time we were heading back to the truck, we were tired, sore, and with the heat being up around 28C officially, the sun was bearing down on us enough that we both had heat stroke by the time we reached the truck. We were wearing hats, thankfully. By the time we got home, a wind storm was brewing and shortly after we got ourselves inside, it began raining!!! We could have used that rain on the long walk back to the truck! Ah well.

We’ve bought more tubs to put things in, such as the existing trays of alfalfa I need to finish crushing, more dandelion, and ideally, more chokecherry leaf when that harvest begins later this summer.

This weekend, we are at Schubert Centre for their summer market, then we are back at the Rutland Flea Market. We’ve purchased a 4ft folding table that we hope will be big enough to handle a tighter version of the layout we had at Lumby Days.

The Lumby Days Indoor Craft Fair blew our socks off! We ran into people we haven’t seen for awhile. More people brought friends or family over to see what we offer, sometimes buying more or standing to one side as their friend or family bought something for themselves. The sample collections we’ve added to the table sold several chests this past weekend, and the individual samples available for $3 each, nearly got cleared out! The largest purchase of those took place as we were in the middle of packing up at the end of the fair. We have learned that people want to buy samples!

The cup and saucer sets we introduced to our flea market table before Creative Chaos, could not be displayed at the 3-day fair, but I put them out for Lumby Days and one of those sets sold as well.

The way the Lumby Days booth setup looked, we are becoming a veritable roving wildcrafted tea parlor with a side of medical insight to help people make choices that benefit their situations. Several times so far this spring, and several times at both major fairs this month, we’ve been asked if we have a storefront. As of yet, we do not, but we realize that if sales continue as they are, we will be in need of more processing space that can allow for a foodsafe kitchen, processing area, and expanded drying area so we can expand available quantities of the teas we offer, and potentially branch into other wildcrafted goods for sale.

We foresee outgrowing our home’s available space at some point over the next year or two. All we need for current expansion estimates, is a minimum of a 60×80 chunk of land. If we move both operations AND our tiny home, we’d need 100×100. if we move operations, our tiny home and our horse, we’d need 200×200. This need is because we can’t have a business address for the tea business, inside the gated community where we live. It has to stay very much cottage/craft fair. To get a business license for the tea business, Kelowna demands a foodsafe ktichen that Interior Health can inspect before they issue the license. We don’t need the kitchen for the processing and blending of dry herbal tea, but the City needs it before they issue a license. We have some ideas for how to go about the kitchen issue, but the land is another matter entirely. Tea sales are not yet replacing household income, so it’s a catch-22 to figure out how to handle the growth needs and follow all regulations we adhere to.

If you are reading this and you are in the Central Okanagan region, and if you believe you know someone who might help in some way, drop us a line with that information.

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