
2024 was an Amazing Year!
We could also call it “The Year of Expansion”! Ashtree Wildcrafting began 2024 by introducing one new tea, and upscaling our table display with live edge risers. The tea we introduced back in January, was Snow Drift, our answer to everyone’s requests for something similar to Sleepy Time, without being that trademarked tea. Wouldn’t you know it, but we’d go on to sell 51 Snow Drift teas!
We learned that most people want to buy medium-sized cloth reusable tea bags, or the large size, but very few smalls sold. Later in the Fall, I’d go through the smaller of the small size range and put many of them into the tiny category. We actually did sell a couple tiny reusable tea bags though! They do accept a teaspoon’s worth of looseleaf tea, they are just more finicky getting it in there. They might better be used as single-item party favour bags such as for a special marble, a tiny vial, a few jelly beans, or something similar. At just 75 cents, they are handmade and come with a charm.
All sizes of our reusable cloth tea bags are handmade and come with various charms ranging from monograms to keys to crosses to stones and some even feature snips from Bella’s hoof clippings, all cleaned up and ready for use. When we realized that we could make tea bag charms from her hoof clippings, we began saving them. Expect to see more uses of them in the future, such as on the trail kits as closures that Biblical Natural Health Coaching sells!
Selling our teas by the cup this year was a major hit! We sold over 100 cups of tea, and several to those who brought their own mugs to our table. Our cups of tea are cheaper than what you get at 7-Eleven at just $2.50 per cup for wildcrafted, foraged, looseleaf tea in a disposable tea bag. To my shocked surprise partway through 2024, a trip past the coffee bar at a local 7-Eleven revealed their cups start at $2.75 and go up from there, for regular, run-of-the-mill cups of commercially-sold tea! By that logic, our tea sold by the cup should be double what we’re charging, but that doesn’t make sense to us, so we aren’t doing it. If we ever raise our price, it will be because the cost of the cups and disposable bags rise.

As the year progressed, we added a Special Tea: Creekside, in honour of a private property where we have so far only found two ingredients in large quantities, and near the end of the year, we added a Rare Tea: Memories of Earl, (sorry, no image yet for this listing) due to how many people kept asking if we had anything like Earl Grey. Some of the ingredients in that tea are hard for us to find in large quantities, even moreso than Creekside, so it’s a more expensive tea as a result. The blend had been created originally back in May when a lady requested it for a gift. We’d sell the occasional custom bag of it after that, until finally we realized we’d better make it beforehand, having lost 3 sales of it one day due to not having it premade. We then sold 4 officially-bagged versions of that as the Christmas craft fair season wound down.
Sales of our teas went so well over the course of 2024, that we are doing our first ever Top Five Tea Report!!! Out of the now 11 teas at our table,
- Stamina Potion Lite sold 66 bags,
- Warm Hug sold 57 bags,
- Orchard Rose sold 53 bags,
- Snow Drift sold 51 bags, and
- Morning Frost sold 40 bags!
At the other end of the scale are two teas that we’d begun to wonder if we should retire, until I had to make up a fresh batch of each as the year went along. Sun Drop, our zippy little calming tea, sold 17 bags, and Rail Trail, our mildest flavour on the table that various people claim reminds them of green tea, actually sold 15 bags last year! Colour us pleasantly surprised!
All in all, we had our best year yet at the various craft and wellness fairs we attended, and we’re looking forward to what 2025 brings our way! If the promises of more upper respiratory pandemics are scaring you a bit, be sure to get yourself a bag of Pine Garden. Craft and wellness fairs give discounts on our teas, so the prices you see on the website are full price and shipping is flat rate. If you are in the Okanagan and wanting to arrange pick-up/drop-off instead, we can refund the shipping fee and arrange to meet up in person.
We are now looking at our calendar and figuring out just how much more foraging will need to be done to prepare for the fairs we want to attend this year! As it is, some of our ingredients got dangerously low that we harvested last year, which may mean putting various limited-run teas on our table if the growing season starts out slow again.
Do keep an eye on our web calendar. There are a number of fairs pencilled in offline that will begin appearing once they are registered for. We were asked multiple times about advanced foraging workshops, which will be headed up by Marilynn from her Biblical Natural Health Coaching website, if this interests you, drop her a line at bnhc@naturalhealthcoaching.ca and she’ll send you the draft list that you can share your feedback and months you’d like to attend. Various homeschooling parents have also shown interest in our introductory foraging workshop as well. If those interest you too, send an email to Marilynn as well.
We have a feeling that 2025 is going to be a busy year for Ashtree Wildcrafting! We wish you the best of health this year, and look forward to seeing you in person at a fair or event.