Buried Under a Fall Harvest! – Biblical Natural Health Coaching

Listen to this article

Here we are at the end of another month already! It’s been busy! Foraging has continued to be about shoring up stocks that we hope will last us through to the next foraging season for various herbs. My concerns about crab apples were SOUNDLY put to rest by the tree over-producing this year! September 16th we came home with 5 grocery bins of apples!

Now here on October 1st, we’ve managed to process 3 of those 5 bins. There has been attrition for sure, applesauce and baking along the way, but by and large, the bulk have been getting dried and broken into useable pieces for future use in a couple teas sold by Ashtree Wildcrafting.

The weekend prior, we were at my cousin’s place near Rock Creek as we took in the Rock Creek Fall Fair as vendors, and while the sales numbers weren’t any better than more local fairs, it would be the foraging at my cousin’s property that more than paid for our trip there and back! Some of the apples we have dried came from there. The Great Mullein patch, the largest we’ve seen on private property to date, not only filled up the remaining space in our tub, but I had to press it down to fit it all in.

I was reminded of the Scriptures that state:

Honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase: So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine.
Proverbs 3:9-10 KJV

Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.
Luke 6:38 KJV

The information God has given us, is shared freely at our booth in the various fairs we attend. We always pray, asking God to bring people by who need or want what He’s given us to offer, and who are willing to buy. Putting God in charge of marketing like this often means tripling last year’s sales. But that’s put us in a bit of a bind this year, trying to scramble to catch up, replenish stocks, and prepare for the coming period when we can’t harvest various herbs till they begin growing again. Various herbs are available at certain times of year, so the point is to get to that harvest time for each herb we use. This has meant asking God for wisdom in both obtaining the harvest, as well as in processing it so we lose as little as possible. To that end, even a dandelion harvest that I’d thought we’d lost most of due to rains that came when we couldn’t get out to the drying shelter, still had 4 trays we could use! We are finally unearthing things in the drying shelter, hoping to have most of it in storage before the shelter has to be put away for the winter, so discovering we hadn’t lost the entire dandelion harvest was amazing! We need to harvest more of this herb in our little lawn patch, but this kind of preservation has been happening the entire growing season so far!

I’ve been periodically tithing on earnings from our fairs, because although those earnings have been small by part-time employment standards, they are still earnings and I am still grateful for them! Tithing is something that occurred before the Law, during the Law, and after Christ fulfilled the Law. The Pharisees thought they could trap Jesus with this issue:

And they send unto him certain of the Pharisees and of the Herodians, to catch him in his words. And when they were come, they say unto him, Master, we know that thou art true, and carest for no man: for thou regardest not the person of men, but teachest the way of God in truth: Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not? Shall we give, or shall we not give? But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them, Why tempt ye me? bring me a penny, that I may see it. And they brought it. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said unto him, Caesar’s. And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. And they marvelled at him.
Mark 12:13-17 KJV

Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation. Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.
Malachi 3:8-10 KJV

Making room for the crab apple harvest resulted in buying a couple 15L tubs. A massive Canada Thistle harvest had us buy a very large cookie tin and a 20 L tub. We’ll see which foods get which tubs, but so far, of the 2 15L tubs, we’ve over-filled one and begun another, with 2 grocery bins still to process.

Our rosehip harvest is over-producing as well, with one full crushed rosehip 3kg honey tub, and another 3/4’s full, and I haven’t finished processing the recent haul along a path out on crown land. We have several zones we harvest rosehips from, because these are winter food for the animals as well as us. Our goal is to double what we had last year so we don’t run out before next fall. It appears we are well on our way to achieving that goal! The chokecherry leaf is close to that goal as well. We may need another big run for leaf. Discovering that the deer tend to leave the twigs when they take the berries, means we can visit “stripped” trees and get those twigs ourselves and thus the leaves that are on them. This means I don’t have to continue drowning in chokecherry juice if I don’t want to. While we are now selling chokecherry syrup and jelly while supplies last, it wasn’t on the original todo list. Figuring out what to do with all that extra juice however, quickly put it on that list!

The last two herbs we don’t quite have double of yet, are catnip and curly dock leaf. Interestingly, one zone is showing the catnip regrowing! There are young plants growing among the older stalks this late in the season! Often there is a resurgence of curly dock too at this time of year, but not seeing it as frequently in our usual foraging zones. If you are reading this from the Central Okanagan, I’m all ears if you have catnip and curly dock leaf on publicly accessible land near you, or even on your own property.

We will be at the Joe Rich Firehall this Saturday morning from 9am to noon. This is the last date to register for the curly dock advanced foraging workshop on the 18th. If you prefer to pay in person, please come see us at the Joe Rich Firehall on Saturday. If we get enough registrants, we could end up with quite a meal to enjoy, with most of it containing wild ingredients! Click here to register online, or send $70 by etransfer.

The next major fair we’ll be at will be the Vernon Wellness Fair happening October 25th and 26th at the Vernon Rec Centre. in between times, we are at the Rutland Flea Market on Sundays.

God is amazing. We are scrambling to find storage for everything He allowed us to harvest this season, and hoping to have it all in storage before the snows hit, because our drying shelter won’t handle the weight. It’s a market canopy, and the metal is not built for heavy water weight.

Work on the herbal textbook continues, slowly. . . I’m now at letter R in adding historical references from 7 sources, and when those are done, two more crossed my desk to add to the historical side and at least one of those will have me updating my database too, which some incredible nutritional tables in it’s appendix! When I’m finally done the historical side, I get to add the present day notes, and each food’s nutritional/medicinal profile! We’ll see if I get to that before Christmas or not!

To top everything off to end the month of September, our deep freezer died! I’d bought it used for $50 when my kids were very young, and it was already 20 years old at that time. So it’s had a good run. God provided another deep freezer, that at first glance, seemed smaller, but when we got it into position, it’s actually quite a bit larger! The old one, which I still have the key for, will become dry storage, answering questions about where to put stuff we had begun tripping over in the house!

God is good!

Sharing is caring:

Comments (0) Cancel reply