2025, the year that life for Ashtree Wildcrafting literally went wild! We’d begun the year having discovered the Rutland Flea Market happening every Sunday and figured, why not see how it goes? To begin with, it seemed we had every old guy in the place filing past our booth to see what we were about and I wondered if we’d joined an Old Guys’ Club! But it turned out earnings weren’t that bad over the winter months and by the time winter transitioned to spring breakup, we’d run out of several tea-making ingredients!
Running out of the ingredients key to several of our most popular teas was both a boon and a bane as coming months would display. We had several major craft fairs and a large wellness fair to attend, so to keep things on the table, Ashley formulated several stand-in teas that initially were intended as stop-gap measures with ingredients we still had a fair bit of. By the time foraging season could commence, people were rather liking those new teas, and they’d end up sticking around, becoming our Special and Rare Teas.
Foraging season saw us hit the ground running, because we had a solid “grocery list” of herbs we needed to shore up for continued dates on the fair calendar, as well as trying to ensure we’d have enough for both the Christmas craft fair season AND get through to the 2026 growing season! Thanks to one rather rainy stretch, we lost a bin of drying nettle, but otherwise, losses were minimal throughout the 2025 foraging season.
We made our first appearance at Creative Chaos, with a booth almost too small for our setup. We are debating returning for 2026 or not. Earnings at that fair would, at the gross income level, barely edge out Lumby Days. We brought more home from Lumby Days due to the far more affordable table fee with double the booth space.
Summer foraging went nuts, and then we’d attend the Rock Creek Fall Fair in September. Family living in the Rock Creek area encouraged us to forage on their property, and we brought home all the Great Mullein we will ever need for the coming year!
The day following that trip, we were out at a private property near Lumby and Coldstream where there is a crab apple tree. This year, it seriously bumper-cropped to the point where after filling 5 superstore bins, we still had only cleaned off maybe half the entire tree! This would warrant the first time we bothered to buy an electric, multi-temp, multi-tray dehydrator. Normally we air dry everything and when days get cooler, things like rosehips get dried in the toaster oven. But with 5 bins of crap apples to chop and dry, air drying wasn’t going to cut it! We had that dehydrator running nearly 24 hrs/7 days/wk from the week of September 16th through to the end of October! Of course that wasn’t without batches of apple sauce and some baking thrown in for good measure.
Mid-October would see our second major round of craft fairs hit for the year, as fall craft fairs quickly transitioned to winter/Christmas craft fairs! At each major flip of the switch this year, one or both of us were going, “I’m NOT Ready!!!” Prepping for the Christmas craft fairs caught us off guard too. But thanks to darn near running ourselves ragged over the major foraging season phases, we were ready, and the only ingredients we’re worried about now, are used in a couple of our rare teas. One bush didn’t fruit at all this year, anywhere in the valley, and the other ingredient needs more foraging zones to gather from in the coming year if we want to avoid running out of that ingredient again.
We also introduced a new tea on our table for the Christmas season: High Noon Spice. This is a tea featuring ONLY Central Okanagan herbs, but taking cues from other spice teas in the types of ingredients used. For example, most people’s favourite chai contains cinnamon. Cinnamon is a bark. We’d learned this past year, that Pine bark when ground, has spicey and vanilla flavour notes to it. Parsley when added to water, takes on a peppery flavour (but you can cook with it and it won’t get peppery otherwise! go figure. . . ). This blend is part powder, part leaf as a result, so it needs a vertical shaking before you scoop out a teaspoon for your cup. Otherwise, it is a spice blend, with a nice aromatic spice scent. Most people were grabbing the sample envelopes for this tea, leaving us with 3 samples left in the bag after the Christmas fairs ended. One of the ingredients we only just learned grows in the area back in the summer, so we intend to grab far more of it in coming years!
As Christmas segways into New Years, Ashley and I are catching our breath, recuperating, and looking to catch up on some tasks that we couldn’t touch this past year, before the foraging season starts up again for 2026. You will find us at the Rutland Flea Market again starting January 4th.
We were very happy to see returning customers this year, customers who were sold on our teas because of gifts or being served a cup at a friend’s house. Warm Hug was once again our best-selling tea of the entire year! Although they only debuted in June, our sample collections have been selling as well, and the individual samples that hold up to six cups of tea per envelope, have at times been flying off their tray! We sold several of our new Mini Apothecaries, and as suspected, the ones holding the plague doctor mask were the more frequent sellers.
Speaking of frequent sellers, we actually have enough product out on the craft fair table to be able to look at trends. What are people buying? Drum roll please. . .
Our top 10 teas for 2025, most popular at the top and working our way down:
- Warm Hug
- Snow Drift
- Stamina Potion Lite
- Pine Garden
- Orchard Rose
- Morning Frost
- Northern Tropics
- Sunsoaked Trails
- Rail Trail
