• Ashtree Wildcrafting Custom Tea Blend
    General

    Excited to Offer Custom Teas By Request Online!

    November 11, 2024 - By 

    A quick note to everyone that we are now offering the ability to request custom tea blends directly from this website!  In the past, we only offered this in person at the various craft fairs we attend, but now we can take your request online.  The cost of your bag of tea and the shipping will be communicated to you via email.  The option of giving us a phone number is there if you think we might want to call you to verify or confirm a detail, but you do not have to supply a phone number to complete the…

  • company - General

    Fall 2024 Updates: Site Tweaks, a New Tea, and Upcoming Fairs

    October 4, 2024 - By 

    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…

  • Pot of chokecherry
    General

    Chokecherry Harvest Has Begun!

    August 12, 2024 - By 

    Today’s foraging run was all about the chokecherries! Many of the trees are only half-ready to pick at this time, but others are fully ready, some Pin (red) and some Black. Some bushes put out tiny berries, but most of them are putting out really fat, plump berries this year! We actually need more leaf than cherry this year, but I’ll make more juice concentrate and syrups with the berries we bring home just the same. We have quite a bit already dried from previous years that we haven’t worked our way through yet, so no need to dry them…

  • Catnip
    General

    Foraging, at Home and on the Trail

    June 11, 2024 - By 

    The tiny “lawn” patch that came with the pad we rent, is a literal power-patch!  We create a poster now each spring of what it appears will be growing there. Today was the third harvest since that poster went up, and. . . This pic shows most of the result: 1 long tray of mustard weed, the equivalent of 2 trays’ worth of horsetail, a tray of pineapple weed, 4 trays of prickly lettuce, and 3 trays of dandelion. I have at least one tray’s worth of broadleaf plantain waiting to be hand washed, but the washing machine is using…

  • General

    Edible Scotch Thistle, It’s Uses, and Harvesting and Preparing it

    June 6, 2024 - By 

    One of the wild herbs we are starting to get into using more of in regular meals, is the Scotch Thistle. This grows all over the barn where we keep my daughter’s horse, and the barn owner regularly tries to get rid of it every year.  Last year, Ashley took some glam shots of some of the really tiny ones that just seemed to have SO much personality! Here is one of them. As a member of the thistle family, it is really good at supporting one’s liver and contains Silymarin just like the other thistles do. According to a…

  • General

    Today’s Foraging Run Almost Got Cancelled!

    May 27, 2024 - By 

    So today’s foraging run was supposed to have been cancelled due to largely having run out of space to dry stuff at home! Then we attended the May 25th fair down in Kettle Valley, and discovered that to replenish some of our teas before June 9th’s wellness fair at the Laurel, we’d run out of Pasture Sage! We did VERY well at the Kettle Valley event! So we couldn’t let this week go by without seeing if we could find any Pasture Sage in one of our foraging zones where we know it grows. While the sage is indeed growing,…

  • Blog - General

    Today’s Foraging Workshop and a Lightning Strike!

    May 19, 2024 - By 

    So we ran our first foraging workshop today with one attendee, taking her to a trail often frequented by other foragers, but that we hadn’t scouted out yet for what is growing there this year. The workshop portion took roughly 30-35 minutes. But by the time we were done with the initial trail and our guest wanting to join us on going to another nearby foraging zone afterward, we were out there for a total of 5 hours! She was very happy to receive her foraging notebook and did make some notes, take pictures of plants we pointed out to…

  • General

    A Tea Order and A Marathon Foraging Run – Reminder of Upcoming Foraging Workshops

    May 6, 2024 - By 

    Today’s foraging run is brought to you buy a custom tea request at the recent wellness fair, that was hoped to be a wild flavour version similar to Earl Grey. The purchaser liked the smell, and if the recipient likes the tea, we need to be ready for potential re-orders. For starters, plants in the Okanagan area in general, are not caffeinated. None of our research has shown any plants to contain caffeic acid, let alone to any degree. What we DO have, is a plant that when steeped too long, begins to taste much like black tea without any…

  • General

    Foraging Workshop Dates and Registration

    April 23, 2024 - By 

    Introducing Foraging Workshop dates with Ashtree Wildcrafting and Biblical Natural Health Coaching! Ashtree Wildcrafting will be present on May 19th and June 2nd, but Biblical Natural Health Coaching will be present on all four dates consisting of May 18th, 19th, June 1st and June 2nd. The workshop and tour will be held somewhere in the Central Okanagan, with locations to be announced as they are firmed up. Cost is $30 which gets you a reserved seat, a pen, a foraging notebook, and an in-person tour discovering and discussing various wild plants in the area and what they are useful for.…

  • General

    Macerated Aromatic Oils, and the Discovery of Scented Lies

    April 20, 2024 - By 

    This week, we’ve been very busy foraging around the barn property each evening. Coming home with more purple deadnettle, yarrow, discovered quite a bit of desert parsley we need to grab, and began picking arrowleaf balsomroot flowers for Ashley’s aromatic oil by maceration experiment. Apparently according to old books from over 200 years ago, this was how perfumaries got their perfume oils before distillation became the rage for making essential oils. The arrowleaf balsomroot flower has an interesting scent. It first strikes you as having a quiet vanilla scent, continue sniffing, and you discover a sweet note reminiscent of white…