First Foraging Run of Spring 2025, Passover, and Using Our Own Herbal Medicine

First Foraging Run of Spring 2025, Passover, and Using Our Own Herbal Medicine

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empty CrossHere we are, the evening of Good Friday, the day we give thanks and express our gratitude for Jesus Christ choosing to take our sin upon Himself and carry it to the cross on our behalf, tearing in two the veil that separated man from God, because now the way was made possible that through Christ, we could approach God directly. Christians the world over, will celebrate Jesus rising from the dead on Sunday, an event that Scripture calls The Resurrection, when Jesus revived the physical body He’d chosen to inhabit while on this earth, and changing it from one that dies, to one that lives forever. This is THE most important series of events in the life of the believer, because without it, we’d be no better off than anyone in any other religion out there! Only one road leads to Heaven, and that is through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. A relationship with Christ is what sets us apart, a living, breathing, active Saviour who will one day return as King.

Desert Parsley
Desert Parsley
3-flowered Avens aka Prairie Smoke
3-flowered Avens aka Prairie Smoke

In our house, we celebrate a small, Messianic version of Passover, which was a feast given by God to the Jewish people to remember their flight out of Egypt. This feast contains many pointers to Christ and what He would do for us, and we reflect on that around our table every Passover. Since we began foraging almost 10 years ago, we’ve always endeavoured to have our first wild salad of the season at this particular meal, being sure to include wild herbs that would fit the “bitter” description, such as mustard weed, yarrow, etc.

Heart-shaped Arnica, young
Heart-shaped Arnica, young
fir resin
fir resin

This year, our wild salad and “bitter herbs” will include mustard weed, yarrow, dandelion, stonecrop, and curly dock leaf. I need to pick the dandelion and mustard weed tomorrow in our little lawn patch.

Thursday’s foraging run was disappointing on the alfalfa front, as the patch we hoped to take snippets of, is barely getting started. It is higher than the valley floor, so I’ll have to contact a couple private properties to go get it there instead.

Chocolate Lily, endangered
Chocolate Lily, endangered

We did however start harvesting Desert Parsley, some tiny arnica leaves, stonecrop, more juniper berries, and Ashley got some more resin, and grabbed more lichen as well.

Arrowleaf Balsamroot
Arrowleaf Balsamroot

This early in the season, we were pleasantly surprised to find 3-flowered Avens starting to flower, and found a chocolate lily in flower! We grabbed more 3-flowered Aven leaves as well. Arrowleaf Balsamroot is starting to flower in that zone, while on the valley floor, it’s yellow flowers are dotting the lower hills all over the place, including at the barn.

young scotch thistle
young scotch thistle

Thursday afternoon, we went to the barn and harvested young scotch thistle. The owner wants them gone, so if we don’t get to them, he’ll dump roundup (ie: glyphosate!) on them! Ashley and I split up with me doing the chopping and her doing the digging. One of her books talks about using the root in medicine, so when I was done trimming spines off leaf ribs, I chopped the root off as well and tossed the rest.

my scotch thistle workstation
my scotch thistle workstation

By the time she had to stop to do barn chores, I had quite a mound to get through, and ended up bringing home two very full grocery tubs of scotch thistle.

I worked at trimming those up most of the day today. I didn’t get a photo, but filled a grocery tub with nothing but trimmed leaf ribs, or thistle spears as I like to call them. Those are now submerged in water and I hope to start preserving those this weekend. The roots are also submerged, mostly rinsed, but we had to head out to do barn chores. We’ll see what I get done this weekend around Passover preparations.

EDIT April 21st

The bin of thistle spears chopped down into 31 packets roughly the size of two of my handfuls.  Not quite enough for one packet a week for a year, but there’s more thistle to dig up at the barn too.  While chopping the roots for drying, I decided to nibble a piece, and it tasted quite nice!  I changed tack and decided to chop some for drying and some for freezing for later use in hot dishes.  The texture was quite carrot-like and the flavour reminds me a bit of parsnip, and that’s just raw.  I’m rather happy about that discovery!  The dried root will be used for medicine.

end edit

While at the barn, I full-speed slammed the top of my head into a low doorway of the horse trailer so hard that I began to cry. We have a high pain tolerance in our house, so to make myself cry, you know the impact was fast and intense! Ashley reached for Bella’s oil to apply to the bruised and growing goose egg on my skull, and gave me some of Bella’s current eye ointment as that side of my head was seeing affected ear and eye symptoms. A couple herbal lip balms she’s bought from local artisans contained cherry extract and peppermint extract, so I applied those to my temples. When we got home, I took a teaspoon of Prickly Lettuce ACV and a half teaspoon of double-strength Flower Essence of Arrowleaf Balsamroot in a shot glass of water, then a few minutes later, sat down to dinner. Ashley put dinner on the table thankfully.

We joked about buying me one of those insect antennae headbands as this is the third time I’ve cracked my head since the fall. Why I’m suddenly doing this now, I’m not as yet sure, but this is the third time. By the time I got up to do dishes, the pain was pretty much gone. As I type this, it’s been 2 hours since I took the Prickly Lettuce ACV/Arrowleaf Balsamroot glycerite combo, and I can touch the goose egg without it squawking at me. My eyes aren’t bothered by the light directly over my head, and there is a faint ghost of the pain that was there before. This is good! I did not reach for any form of tylenol or ibuprofen, I used the herbal remedies that God grows right here in the Okanagan valley!

You won’t find the glycerine or the ACV on my or Ashley’s websites, but the QR code on the bottles leads to a private link where you can read how to use them.

As the Pentecostal call and answer says: God is good! All the time! And all the time? God is good! (throw hands in the air and cheer)

Quick note about how Spring continues to shape up here. We will be at Maplefest on the 26th, that’s a week from tomorrow. We will be at the Lake Country Spring Market at the community hall on Main St at the Berry rd roundabout. That is on May 4th. May 10th we’ll be at the Joe Rich Firehall for their Mother’s Day Breakfast and Market from 9am to 1pm. May 17th we’re doing our Arrowleaf Balsamroot Glycerine Tincture Advanced Foraging Workshop. If you want to be there, be sure to register before the deadline so I know how many to prepare for. We’ll use the field kitchen. This time of the month is often summer round one, but we’ll bring the canopy anyway, if not for any rain, to keep the sun off us!

June will be a busy month as we begin with Creative Chaos in Vernon followed by Lumby Days in Lumby the week afterward, then Schubert Centre the week after that. If you want to attend the thistle workshop that month, please register before the deadline, and the way that month is filling up, the sooner you register the better!

Let me close with another Pentecostal call and answer! HE IS RISEN! HE IS RISEN INDEED!

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