Chokecherry Oddities, Workshops, and 2025 Fall Forecast

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Found this little hitch hiker in one of our bags of chokecherries this morning. Apparently it came home with us yesterday after a foraging run. That shell is translucent. We carefully snapped off the leaf from it’s stem and placed the little one in a safer place.

We use the leaf as a base in several wildcrafted teas that we sell.

The berries from this bag are outside in my cooking shelter, in the crockpot on high. We can’t be filling the tiny home with steam, so I do it outside. I miss doing 3 pots at once on the stove, but the crockpot holds roughly 2+ pots worth, so I still get 2 to 3 mason jars of juice concentrate each time I use it. We need two large tubs of crushed leaf before harvest season ends this year, and we are very close to filling the first of those tubs! Thank You Lord!

It’s been a weird year for chokecherry this year in our region. Something has caused enough stress on the trees that some attempted to fruit and stopped. Others partially fruited, one end of a droop fully formed with the other end partially formed. Trees that fully fruited out were bumper crop, and of those, the deer and bears seem to be pigging out on them this year, which is bad as they can’t process the berry properly (we see evidence in their scat).

Black chokecherry (wild mustard to left of photo)

Amusingly enough, we found a full stand of bumper crop behind a very tall patch of wild mustard weed! I guess the deer and bear don’t like wild mustard.

Closer to home where more people roam around, there is nowhere near as much animal evidence on the stands. Some of the trees have decided to take the year off. Around here, the on one year off the next, seems to be a suggestion rather than the rule. Many years we get bumper after bumper!

So it’s an odd year with some taking the year to rest, others giving a bumper crop, animals eating far more than they usually do of a berry they can’t process very well, and some trees somehow being halted in their efforts. . . But with all those challenges, we have somehow managed to nearly fill one tub with crushed leaf, and soon will begin the second tub.

The past 10 days have been very busy! We began with a foraging workshop and trail tour for a homeschooling family on the 9th. We followed that up by attending the Garlic Festival on the 10th. A garlic farmer bought my 38 Nutritional/Medicinal Profiles book. I’d placed my business card in the page listing off such a long list of nutritional/medicinal benefits for Garlic, that it had required a smaller font to get it all one page!

A few days later, we were at the Joe Rich Society Night Market on the Thursday. We would do another introductory foraging workshop and trail tour on the 16th. That one was alot of fun too, this time because we were able to hit two trails for the price of one! The wild raspberry season is all but done now, so if we want more wild raspberry leaf, we need to get out there! We are using it now in a couple teas, originally thanks to the private property we visit out near Lumby.

This was followed by attending Fintry Manor’s Bear Affair Festival on the 17th. This was a nail biter from a financial perspective, as we hardly had a single sale all day until toward the end of the day! Then suddenly we not only made our table fee, but earned a tiny bit of profit on top of it! It probably didn’t help that Kelowna Made, an artisan fair held by the City of Kelowna, was going on this weekend as well. We were able to have some good conversations with people however, and two of our sales took place AFTER closing! We always watch in dismay as other vendors begin packing up anywhere from 10 min to a full 30 min or more before closing! If we did that, we wouldn’t make some of the sales and connections that we’ve made. By waiting to the absolute end to pack up our booth, we’ve run into new contacts, made surprising sales, and had some very important conversations! I am pleased we were able to do these activities at Fintry!

Heading into the fall, the next Advanced Foraging Workshop on the official list, is the Personal Hygiene Workshop, where we will be making personal hygiene products using wild herbs. Because of the various times of year when the herbs are gathered, we won’t go out to the forest and meadows to harvest them. Instead, the herbs that will be used will be provided. There is potential to have this particular workshop indoors, but I need registration no later than August 30th to make that work. If registrations don’t come in until September 13th, we will be using the field kitchen. The event will be cancelled if there are no registrations by the 13th of September.

September 20th, we are back at Schubert Centre in Vernon for their fall craft fair. We will be returning to the Vernon Wellness Fair in late October, and we have a Curly Dock Advanced Foraging Workshop that month as well. October 4th is a wildcard, that may see us either at Joe Rich again, or potentially doing our first Tea Talk at a shop downtown Kelowna. We are waiting on plans to see if that can happen or not. If not, we’re out in Joe Rich, which isn’t any kind of loss. We are growing to really appreciate that sprawling, rural community out there.

November explodes on us, and as events are confirmed and paid for, they are appearing on the website calendar. It is best to assume that we are busy every single weekend that month, but once all events are covered, the calendar will become more accurate. The Advanced Foraging Workshop for that month is intended to be a Wednesday, and for the kids to learn how to string wild rosehips on string, to both decorate their home for the season, and have a source of vitamin C to enjoy afterward.

December doesn’t have an Advanced Foraging Workshop planned, but could be busy with Christmas craft fairs. The pencilled-in calendar is already looking a bit full offline!

If you are wanting to do fall foraging workshops, it will be best to reach out to me to discuss your preferred date(s), and don’t be surprised if it ends up a) being a weekday and b) out of band for the days we typically do them. Normally we set aside Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, if we aren’t at fairs, for foraging workshops and trail tours. That may change this fall due to how many fairs we are booked for that are happening on weekends.

I do encourage people to take our foraging workshop and trail tour at least once every season, to get to know the herbs available for foraging in each season. This includes the wintertime believe it or not. The winter harvest looks very different from the spring, summer or fall harvests, but it still offers benefits to those willing to bundle up and head out.

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