Highland Organics Wild Leaf Tea

To all our amazing customers who are purchasing our Wild Leaf Tea and are drinking it for various reasons, we love you and we thank you for supporting all we do. Some of you are enjoying our Wild Leaf Tea to help control your diabetes, or you are drinking it to help with inflammation in your bodies. Maybe some of you are drinking it for your eyes, brain or heart. Thank you.

If you tried to purchase our Wild Leaf Tea and saw that it was "out of stock", and your hearts sank, we are so sorry. Our hearts sank too when we realized that all the leaves we had harvested from our fields last fall were almost gone!! Truly we wish we had more, but this is farming and in agriculture, when your are out, you are out, but hold on! Harvest is coming!

If you are trying to purchase our leaves and are getting an 'out of stock' message, please know we did our best to plan for this year, but our best little secret got out to a lot more folks this year than we had planned for and now many more people know about us and are purchasing the Wild Leaf Tea from us. Thank you everybody!!

For those of you who are regular customers and have been purchasing from us for many years, please remember just a couple of things:

1. We are an agricultural farm, and what this means is that when it is gone, it is gone only for a season. Remember, the harvest is coming again!! We grow what we sell and it is 100% pure, no fillers, fluff or stuff added in to make it last longer.

2. We will harvest more leaves in the fall starting in September. We will plan to harvest more this year. In fact we will try to double what we had harvested last year! We harvested about 100 pounds of our Organic Wild Maine Blueberry Leaves and so we will try to harvest over 200 pounds in 2018, all by hand, but this time not by ourselves!

A LITTLE ABOUT THIS FARMER: I have been a blueberry farmer for almost 20 years now. I grow wild Maine blueberries in Stockton Springs, Maine and I grow the low-bush blueberries organically. I began transitioning my low-bush, wild Maine blueberry fields in 1999 and became certified organic by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) in 2002. We have been certified organic by MOFGA every year since then. That is a big blue deal and hopefully if you are purchasing wild Maine blueberries, organically, ask the grower how long they have been certified, and ask to see their certification. Anniversary date & Effective date. Anniversary is yearly, Effective is the 1st time certified. For us, we have an Effective date of July 2002. Our Anniversary date is 05/15/2019. We are always happy to show off our certification, just ask!

In 2004, I began thinking beyond the low-bush, wild Maine blueberry fruit and started exploring possibilities with the leaf that turned crimson red on the low-bush blueberries in our fields. What I learned from the local Indians and through research that we did with the local high school chemistry class was that the low-bush, wild Maine blueberry leaves had more anthocyanins or antioxidants in them then the fruit from the same plant. Wow! That was a big deal. All wild Maine blueberry leaves have antioxidants in them, including the green leaves. That research was done by a University of Maine research student a few years ago, but what WE learned was that the leaves, when they turn a crimson red color in the fall, had the most anthocyanins or antioxidants in them. So we began hand harvesting the leaves in the fall after they started to turn the crimson red color and then air/heat dry them to lock in the antioxidants that were harvested.

The difference between low-bush & high-bush blueberries: The most important thing to remember is that all blueberries are not the same. Low-bush blueberries are 6-8 INCHES tall at maturity, while high-bush blueberries are 5-6 FEET tall. Low-bush blueberries have small, sweet fruit high in antioxidants, and the high-bush blueberries have large, fleshy fruit, also with antioxidants. Low-bush blueberries are wild, not planted, fields/acres that are managed, while high-bush blueberries are planted in rows and maintained. Low-bush blueberries have a higher anthocyanin or antioxidant count in the fruit & the leaves than the high-bush blueberry fruit & leaves according to the independent research that has been done. The low-bush, wild Maine blueberries that are grown organically have a higher anthocyanin or antioxidant count in the fruit than the non-organic wild Maine blueberries grown, (according to the independent research we did in 2004).

We hand harvest the wild Maine blueberry leaves that we grow organically in the fall by hand stripping the leaves from the plant. After the leaf harvest is over I will mow my low-bush blueberries all the way down to the ground and I will burn this field in the spring so that the plant will not produce any fruit for an entire year. I harvest my fields for fruit and leaves every other year.

High-bush blueberry growers should never, ever harvest the leaves of their plants or they will destroy the fruit sets for the following year. If the fruit sets are damaged, there will be no fruit the following year. High-bush blueberry plants produce fruit every year. The low-bush blueberry fields produce fruit every OTHER year.

I am a blueberry farmer, and a grateful one at that. I love what I get to do, who I get to do it with, and who we get to do it for. Thank you for trusting us with "A Taste of Wild Maine". We will keep you posted as to when we will have this new crop in and your product available to you again.

Sincerely,

Theresa & Tom