Summer won’t be outdone by spring! No Way! – Biblical Natural Health Coaching

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So apparently July wasn’t going to be outdone by June. We were at the Rutland Flea Market on Sunday, then this Thursday we’ll be at the Joe Rich Night Market from 5 to 7pm where they will also be having a BBQ pulled pork sandwich for dinner! On July 12th, we’ll be back in Joe Rich, this time on Goudie Rd for a Summer in the Mountains mini Market from 10am to 4pm.

July 12th is also the last day to register for July’s Purslane Advanced Foraging Workshop. As it turns out, we will be supplying the purslane for this workshop rather than take everyone out for it, because the largest supply of purslane we know of, is on a private property! We don’t need the coleman stove for this workshop, as the recipes we will make are all ambient temperature. We will need to know how much of the non-foraged ingredients to bring however, and how many containers to obtain to make sure you go home with some of what we make that day, so get your registration in by July 12th.

If you prefer to pay in person, stop by the Summer in the Mountains Mini market, or come by Thursday between 5 and 7pm at the Joe Rich firewall to see us there and pay in person for the July 26th advanced foraging workshop.

size of prickly pear fruit in the Central Okanagan

We’ve had issues with the old Coleman, and have decided to forego the vintage unit’s white gas tank and use cooking gel cans instead for any field kitchens requiring a stovetop. I may see if I can edit the unit to remove the white gas elements and gas lines. We’ll see. The stove box can still be used, just a slight bit more modern.

This will be useful when we do the chokecherry berry juice concentrate, syrup, and jelly advanced foraging workshop in August! A couple advanced foraging workshops in the fall will benefit from the more reliable heating source as well.

We were out foraging this past Saturday, harvesting pasture sagewort as we need to prepare for fall tea sales that use that herb. The tiny prickly pear cactus that grows in the area had itty-bitty tiny fruit, and we despined two of them to see how they taste raw. Not bad. Both of us agreed that it would make a nice base to build other dishes ontop of.

We went back to a large canada thistle stand with it’s wild raspberry bushes, and gathered more buds.

The berry bushes have ripe and half-ripe berries on them now, with many more yet to ripen! We brought home a bag, but in the heat, they’d already begun to juice themselves, so they got tossed into the blender along with some saskatoon berries, to make a wild bumbleberry fruit sauce. We will enjoy this over ice cream!!!

We also found a hidden patch of wild sarsaparilla!!! This is banned for sale in the US due to dosing discrepancies, but it used to be the basis for rootbeer soda way back in the early settler days. Sarsaparilla actually has many beneficial uses that I wrote about during the pandemic. We may just try our hand yet, at making our own version of wildcrafted rootbeer. We don’t expect it to taste like A&W or Mugs or even Barq’s, but we do have dandelion root, burdock root, and now when we want it, sarsaparilla root too. There are various recipes out there that people have published, so we’ll have to try one.

As the seasons change, so do the herbs we are able to forage for. The window for obtaining alfalfa in the wild has largely closed on the valley floor. Some alfalfa in higher elevations are still in the flowering stage and not yet gone to seed, but once they go to seed, that’s it for the year. My harvesting goal for that herb however, was met this past week, so I am very happy! Catnip’s window will be closing soon as it doesn’t always like continuing to grow in Okanagan summers. We still need to try to fill the tea tub, but we’ll see how we do. Nettle may soon die off for the summer as well. The seeds are a substitute for fennel in cooking and medicine. We have a fair bit of nettle already, so not too worried about that ingredient. Chokecherry leaf is one we have to gather as much as we can however, trying to get two tea tubs if we can this season! We get most of our leaf while picking the berry, and we’ll be drowning in the stuff to get that much leaf this year! We’ve purchased some ph strips and plan to sell the syrups and jellies at various markets this fall as we are able. We will be gathering more raspberry leaves from the wild this fall, while gathering the berries themselves as well. Thanks to a private property we need to go visit this summer, we now know how to care for these plants, and can make sure they don’t get as bound up on themselves as we observed earlier this spring.

We thought we might get a break this summer, but it appears the ball just keeps rolling! Don’t forget we’re also at the Fintry Manor Bat Festival on July 19th. Which reminds me, we are NOT at the Rutland Flea Market on the 13th! There is a rock and gem show happening that day, so the flea market can’t run that Sunday! We will be back there however, on the 27th unless otherwise posted on the calendar.

Stay tuned for more news, discussions and foraging escapades, and feel free to forward to others. When I can fit in professional reading that isn’t for the textbook, other issues or health-based articles will also be presented. If you’re hoping I’ll write about something you haven’t seen on my blog yet, drop me a line.

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