Happy Celebration Week! And News of Our Own Too! – Biblical Natural Health Coaching

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Happy Canada Day (July 1st) to my Canadian readers, and Happy Independence Day (July 4th) to my US readers! Here at home, we spent Canada Day more or less in recovery mode after how June went. Not that June was bad, but it was incredibly busy between several large fairs, the Rutland Flea Market, workshops, and our own foraging efforts.

We finished June with two workshops in the same week! We held an introductory workshop last Monday for three participants, and an advanced foraging workshop last Saturday for two participants! Both were fun, educational, had good weather, with lots of discussion and some hiking.

The first workshop was threatened with rain by the weather forecast, but we didn’t have a single drop that morning. It wouldn’t be till well after the workshop had ended, that any rain drops at all would fall that day. I only took one photo on that hike, of a gooseberry bush.

The second workshop had one frustration, and that was our old Coleman camping stove. It’s tank kept losing pressure quickly, but wouldn’t keep a flame unless the air was set to full.

I failed to bring enough matches, but a nearby pile of kindling left by someone else long before that day, was enough in combination with a couple citronella candles I’d already lit, allowed us to fight our way through using the stove for the steps involved in making Canada Thistle Bud Cheese Dip, and some bull thistle breaded spears to enjoy it with.

Again, horrible at the photo-taking thing, but over all, the day was considered a success by all involved.

I tried out a manual mincer I found at the dollar store. We bought two of them, and they work really well to make the cheese sauce, but not so well at mincing up the small round Canada Thistle flower buds. We all agreed we’d throw our portions into the electric blender at home. The idea had been to use non-electric tools to do the same job, but not quite there as it turns out.

We’ve decided to stop using the fuel system of the Coleman stove (1967 vintage), and instead use cooking gel tins instead. We found some with reviews saying it heats things up pretty well and stocked up on them. I will soon be seeing if I can remove the burners themselves so that we can put the gel tins in their spots more directly, under the stove’s grating. One review tried to use these tins for hot-holding at a catering event, and it burned the food! SOLD!!!

Ashley’s Chartered Herbalist Certificate finally arrived in the mail last week as well, so this week we went out for dinner to celebrate! As a Natural Health Practitioner who teaches the benefits of eating meat, we went to our favourite restaurant and they are having a month-long ribfest in honour of their 30th anniversary! I teach the benefits of potatoes, and of course the benefits of herbs in your diet, having insisted on herbalism being one of the tracks I studied. So it fit. We’ve scanned Ashley’s certificate and printed out a smaller version that you’ll see in the door of our apothecary trunk at the various fairs we attend now. She can now add CH after her name!

In additional news, we are working on introducing knock-offs of our business card holder, a mini-me of the larger apothecary trunk, for sale at our table. Many people get drawn in by how it’s all in miniature, and ask if they can buy it. Aspects of the knock-offs are in transit, and after some assembly, we hope to have them on our table if not for the upcoming Bat Festival, maybe for one of the craft fairs in August. They will have various pendants available to choose from, and by fall, potentially various pre-finished chest stains to pick from as well. They won’t be identical to our own, but Michael’s doesn’t sell the blank we made that one from, anymore. Between them and the sample collections, the gifting options at our table this fall could make for a busy Christmas craft fair season.

Work on the textbook continues with the addition of historical uses of herbs found in North America, based on a couple old books from two tribes, one on the west coast and one based in the eastern regions of the continent. This has expanded the list of herbs the historically modern materia medica will cover, because it offers more herbs used historically on THIS land mass, not just those that were used in Sumer, Egypt, the greeko-roman empire, or Europe. Now I’d chosen herbs from those writings that we have access to here, but it is nice to have historical writings from this land mass as well. Typically I go through each book searching for a given herb, then mark off the herb as done when I’ve combed all the books for it and move to the next herb. However, not every book needs that, and one of the North American writings grouped all their medicinal herbs into one section, so I just combed that entire section. We’ll see how many herbs we actually end up covering once the historical entries are finished. It’s larger than the original 218, I can vouch for that!

A new entry has made it to the event calendar! We’ll be at our first evening market out in Joe Rich next Thursday, July 10th. It’s a short 2-hour window, but they’ll also be offering BBQ’d pulled-pork sandwiches to enjoy. So stop by our table, check out the new sample collections and mug socks (for travel or handle-less mugs), and have yourself a pulled-pork sandwich!

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