Foraging Updates, Fall Fair Prep, Fall Harvest Observations and a Safety PSA!

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The smell of rosehips wafts through the house, while flint corn hangs in corners and across eaves, curing. The crockpot outside is on it’s second round of heat-treating chokecherry berries while the first round has been mashed and sits in a hanging cloth over a bowl.

Two of these three foods will be used by Ashley’s craft fair tea business, and she’s hoping the corn, which will be nixtimalized, will help reduce flour purchases this fall. We shall see.

The above paragraph was written earlier in the day. The crockpot is now washed, with it’s second load now sitting in the cloth over the bowl, and the first bowl’s contents now in jars awaiting being turned into more jelly for sale at the Rock Creek Fall Fair coming up in a week’s time. A week from now, we’ll be travelling to stay with family in the Rock Creek area, and thanks to a full schedule, arriving down there that evening. Saturday and Sunday our display will be out under our canopy, minus the ability to buy cups of tea, and minus the vintage english china. Our chokecherry syrups and jellies will take their place.

If you are travelling through Rock Creek the weekend of September 13th and 14th, feel free to check out the Rock Creek Fall Fair on the Kettle River and come say hi. Look for the blue canopy top with the wood TEA sign hanging out front! Our apothecary will be on hand as usual, in case you want a custom tea blend to take home. With no electricity, I won’t have my database with me, but we will have the physical textbooks we often reference, and a few of our historical books on Ashley’s phone.

We won’t have any fir curly dock cookies. The weather has not cooperated to be burning more culinary ash at this time. We will however, have our mini apothecaries out for sale! 24 vials containing actual dried herb from the Central Okanagan, a working porcelain mortar and pestle, a mini materia medica with a recipe section at the back, and your choice of pendant to hang in the middle between the shelves when you have it open on display.

We have begun processing the early-harvest rosehips, and hope to have the teas requiring this ingredient back out on the table for Rock Creek. The air fry basket of our toaster oven is doing a great job drying them!

A recent foraging run found us gathering more kinnickinick, and I had to get photos of just how appley the berries look when partially ripe!

Incidentally, they actually taste better half ripe too. They SO look like tiny apples!

We found an upended tree stump, and found a large clump of resin on it! Ashley had to whip out her knife and break off as much as she could!

You don’t see opportunities to ethically harvest that much resin all in one place, very often! The smell of the resin suggested it belongs to the pine tree.

We gathered more lichen, found a chokecherry bush where we didn’t expect it, and harvested more rosehips.

SPRING/FALL PSA!!!

Ashley had heard recently, how plaid can break up a person’s profile out in the woods and decided to test the theory that plaid can act as a form of camouflage. She has a dark green plaid overshirt, and when we found a shaded spot, she threw it over her and ran to crouch in the shade and had me snap this photo.

You have to seriously zoom in on the photo to see the plaid, and if her face was hidden, the distance might construe the shirt as an odd bush. This is handy information to have, especially if you are out foraging where hunters also go. If you blend in with your surroundings too well, they may not know you are there. So consider this a fall and spring PSA to wear clothing in the bush that will alert hunters that you are not part of the foliage, and not prey either! After seeing this photo, I was very glad to be in my white BNHC logo T-shirt!

Fall has officially begun, days are shortening, and leaves are turning colour. Many berry bushes we are coming across, are already losing their leaves! This even goes for many rose bushes to my surprise! I don’t know if we are in for a colder winter in the Okanagan, or what other potential survival threats the plants may be picking up on, but it appears the wildlife are starting their fattening-up diet early too. We don’t normally feel as if we are competing with them at this point in the Fall, but this year we do. They need to make it through the winter to next spring. The two breeds of mountain ash, the orange and the red, are pretty much ripe now as well. While I do make rowan jelly, we rarely remember to use it, and whatever is in those berries and crab apples, the stuff sitting in my fridge just refuses to go bad!!! So if I harvest it now, it’s to dry and save for later. We haven’t gathered mountain ash so far this fall, but we are only at the beginning of the fall harvest still.

Summer is over. I say that with a bittersweet feel this year. Bitter because of how hot the season ended, and sweet because of how well things went with craft fair sales across the season. As usual, the heat helped dry things very quickly, and we have a major backlog of stuff to crush and get into storage before the fall rains come. The drying shelter will have to come down before the snows hit as well. Maybe at some point we can put up a hard-roofed temporary shelter back there. . . we’ll have to see. The summer harvest otherwise went well. We are mostly caught up now with what we wanted to put away till next year. Some of the herbs didn’t grow as well as we hoped out in the wild, and others, I thought we had more than we do! Oops! We can still harvest some of those going into fall, whew! While I will miss how fast things dried over the summer, I won’t miss the Okanagan summer heat! Until smoke rolled in from fires elsewhere around BC, this week was due to be another hot one. Now we might have one hot day coming up before the weekend, and then several days of rain.

Pray we get everything in the drying shelter put away with minimal losses.

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