End of July Update: Foraging, markets, textbook, and Fall Calendar

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Looking back over July, it has been quite the month! We were at the Fintry Bat Festival and a couple mini markets as well. The mini-markets outdid themselves in the sales we made. Just because it’s small, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth one’s time, and these two did not disappoint in the slightest.

The purslane workshop was cancelled due to lack of sign-ups. That means we are now looking forward to the chokecherry advanced foraging workshop in August! We’ll be making chokecherry juice concentrate, then creating a syrup and a jelly from it. If you’ve never done this before, get your registration in early.

The chokecherry harvest has officially begun, and will stretch through for as long as berries remain on the bushes. Our first harvest was part scouting mission to see how the berries are ripening. We brought home enough in four bags to fill 6 trays and two crockpots. We need more dried this year than in the past, and also need more leaf than previous years too. We got off to a good start.

Our attendance at the Bat festival went well, even with rain that fell in the last two hours of the day. We discovered we needed to waterproof the canopy however. No product got wet, but the tablecloths did in places.

The last flea market for July saw us introduce a product people have been asking requesting for 2 years! We kept saying no because it takes a fair bit of work to do, but we finally relented, and sold one to a very surprising buyer! The first sale of our mini-apothecary chest went to a movie prop manager preparing to do a movie shoot in the Lower Mainland! We didn’t even have the final vial filled with herb, as I forgot we didn’t have that herb in the apothecary and Ashley was filling the vials from the apothecary jars. But the prop manager bought it anyway!

Now we need to get a listing up for it on Ashley’s tea website, and we will have these on hand at every fair and market we go to from here on out. A few will have heart-shaped locks, but the vast majority will have the more vintage-looking bear-face lock more suited to the victorian aesthetic that we have at our table. It wasn’t the heart-shaped lock that sold either, it was the bear-faced lock featuring the gear pendant. We have 10 pendant designs at the moment and every fair will feature one or more of them.

Each mini apothecary comes with a usable, tiny mortar and pestle, and a mini materia medica (latin for “medical herbs”) that features a short write-up of each of the 24 herbs in the mini-apothecary, as well as a few recipes those herbs can be used in.

Ashley plans on giving these units their very own glam photo shoot, so that we can do a proper write-up and promotional campaign with them. But this little bit of miniature fun is a grand blend of both Biblical Natural Health Coaching, and Ashtree Wildcrafting, and we pray it is useful for those who buy it, or for those who receive it as a gift.

We’ve managed to squeeze in some foraging runs as well this month. One trip was exclusively for more wild sage, and for once, we actually stuck to our focus and didn’t come home with a dozen other bags of other herb while we were out there! That’s a big deal for us!

Foraging needs for Ashley’s tea business are chokecherry leaf, sage, yarrow, rosehips and sumac berry from the Staghorn Sumac. It seems that the sumac bushes we have access to, are not flowering this year. Some appeared to have started, then stopped. We need to find more stands that aren’t taking this year as a sabbatical. We’ll be visiting more rosehip stands this fall, as we need to somehow account for higher sales this fall and winter and still get to next fall with next year’s spring and summer sales accounted for as well. This is a tall order, but we’ll see how well we answer it. Sage and yarrow are far easier to get our hands on! The big thing is the 5% rule on public-use crown land, which means we need to draw from several different areas around the Kelowna area.

Fall’s schedule is filling in now. There’s a couple events in September, two so far in October, 3 so far in November, and 2 in December. Some of these have already hit the calendars for Ashtree Wildcrafting and my coaching website. Others will be hitting the web calendars over the next two months. A big one for us will be attending the Rock Creek Fall Fair in September! We have family in the area, and look forward to visiting with them while we are there. We are part of several major fall and Christmas fairs this year, which will be different for us. Things have definitely changed as we’ve gone from only being able to attend school fairs and smaller markets, to being able to visit some of the big ones now!

Efforts on the herbalism textbook continue, but slowly. The combing of historical writings for the historically modern materia medica almost has me at letter D! This is slow going, hampered by the daytime schedule we’ve been keeping trying to ensure enough harvest for various herbs we ran out of back in the spring. Some herbs have been deleted from the medica list, due to suggested translator notes not making sense with what we know about the herbs most herbalists, arborists, and horticulturists write about. But other herbs have been added, tripping across them by accident while working on the list. Eventually, the historical portion will be completed and I can move to the modern write-up for each herb. We’ll see how long it takes to get there.

Sometimes I’ll come across an ancient use for a herb, go to double-check it in today’s research because it seems so “out there”, and find that science has indeed proven it to be of just such a use! This is resulting in my nutritional/medicinal database ballooning in size! I haven’t had time to get it updated for sale in the coaching store, but it’s well over 12,200 entries now! As usual, the teacher learns more than the student while preparing to teach what they thought they already knew. But that’s perfectly ok. The herbal world God has given us is so vast, that one can’t hope to learn all there is to learn about how God’s herbs can be used for human benefit, in a single lifetime! Even relying on the written works of others still means not being able to cover it all adequately. Books such as the Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine, regularly receive updates.

If you’re ever wondering if a herb might exist to help with a given condition, don’t hesitate to reach out. A client intake form is helpful for me to keep on file and refer to when making recommendations, but otherwise you can seek help via one-off questions, my monthly retainer, or requesting regular natural health coaching sessions. You’ll find some of my books in the coaching store, as well as various BNHC-themed gear you can use in your own foraging outings. If you have issues trying to complete a purchase in the coaching store, please reach out so we can work to resolve it and let you get what you’re after.

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