Fall has begun with quite a bang around our place! It began with inputting a number of fall events, only for me to discover today that one event had it’s date entered wrong and hid several of this fall’s fair dates! That is now fixed and you can see more of the many fall and Christmas craft fairs that we’ll be attending this season. The first is coming up this weekend as we attend the Vernon Wellness Fair on October 5th and 6th under Marilynn’s Biblical Natural Health Coaching banner. She’ll have a “Natural Health Fun Zone” set up this time as well that you’ll want to check out! We aren’t far from the fair main entrance!
Prepping for all these fairs meant a few emergency foraging runs as we discovered low ingredients we thought we had plenty of. One is rather plentiful out there right now and can be gathered for as long as they are on the bushes through the winter. This is rosehip, an ingredient that features in several of our teas. We are doing our best to ensure we have enough to get through the fall fair season and through to next fall. We are half-way there.
Another ingredient that can be gathered through the winter months, is lichen. We thought we harvested a fair bit earlier this year, but we will need more to get through to next fall. A third ingredient that we thought we had tons of, but is a base for several teas we blend, lost half it’s volume when we made up more teas ahead of the first few fall fairs! It’s rather late to be grabbing Alfalfa now, particularly with having to be sure we don’t bring home any seed, but we’ll see what we can do before the growing season completely stops for the grasses over the winter.
A brand new tea that also uses Alfalfa, is our first SPECIAL TEA, with two of it’s 4 ingredients coming exclusively from a private property near Lumby! This property features a hidden artesian spring that feeds into Coldstream Creek. In honour of the couple who have granted us permission to forage there, we have named this tea: Creekside!
Due to the exclusive nature of the two main ingredients, this is a limited-availability offering, and only a few will be available on the table at every fair we attend. This is to ensure we don’t over-sell and run out before the next growing season begins. As a result, a maximum of 5 Creekside bags of tea will be set out at any given fair, at a cost of $15 per bag. The online price is set at $17 to reflect the rare nature of these ingredients, but if you buy at a craft fair, you get a $2 discount!
Our fall/Christmas event calendar is filling up, with the potential for more fairs being added in December. One organizer has contacted us to be part of their fair in Vernon that month, while another is not yet sure of a date they might set, while a third has been away and we await their response to our vendor inquiry. November is quite full with just a few days left on the calendar if fairs pop into those dates. October sees us at the Vernon Wellness Fair, then a mini-market at Priest Creek winery on the 20th, followed by a craft fair at Schubert Centre in Vernon on the 26th.
If you haven’t done your Christmas gift shopping yet, be sure to bookmark the events calendar to plan and beat the rush this year.
Lastly, if you’ve checked out our online Tea Shop and wondered where half our teas were, I’ve found them! Adding Creekside to our lineup revealed that for some reason, our shop was only showing a max of 5 teas! I found the tweak necessary and now you can see ALL of our teas, not just the first 5 we ever had to sell years ago! They are now visible, clickable, and you can buy using Square for your online transaction. We apologize to anyone who had tried to find a newer tea in our shop over the past while and couldn’t. Now you can.
