Today we walked to a stretch of rail trail where we scouted out how soon berry season is due to start. While doing that, we ran across what looked like a yellow chokecherry!!! Sure enough, there is such a thing as yellow-bird chokecherry, but I had no idea it grew here in BC. I know we have Black and Pin (Red) and those will be ready for harvest by next week, but I had no idea yellow chokecherry grew out here! There is very little info on it, with what little I have found treating it the same way you'll read about red and black chokecherry. We harvested some and brought it home.

Didn't take pictures of everything today, but we did get more goldenrod, nettle, Canada Thistle, Alfalfa, broadleaf plantain, field mint, more sow's thistle, and destroyed a number of tent caterpillar homes along the way.

Unfortunately, some of these nests were on rather large branches, so we explained to the tree what we were doing and why, and only one didn't want to let go of the affected branch. We broke it off anyway to spare the life of the tree, and we then harvested what wasn't destroyed, showing the tree that we were indeed going to make use of what was still good. The poor trees were seriously sending off fearful and hesitant sensations, so as each one let us break off the branch, we encouraged them. Stationery sentience often strikes me as very "young" in age. One tree had already decided the branch was to die and had cut off food to that branch. It snapped off very easily. We will need to go back and revisit those trees later this summer, maybe next week or the following. One little tree, hardly 2 ft tall, had a single droop of berries on it, so we grabbed them and I couldn't resist giving it a "pet on the head" so to speak.

The hawthorn bushes look ripe from a distance, but up close, they won't be ready for another couple weeks I'm guessing. I never remember to do it, but you can harvest the leaves in the spring and they can be used as sandwich wraps in a physically small way. The First Nations people used to call the hawthorn bush the "bread and cheese" bush because of the leaves and berries, while the term was used in Europe to describe the leaves and flowers. The leaves, flowers, and berries are all edible for food as well as medicine.