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About Hearthstone
Hearthstone Herbal is an herb farm & apothecary located in Thunder Bay, ON. All of our products are made either from plants grown in our chemical free, biodynamic garden, or are mindfully wild harvested from the Boreal forest and its surrounding wild spaces.
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The value that Hearthstone Herbal's products offer, other than being packed with raw, pure herbal chemistry and more love than can be quantified, is that a sincere relationship is built with the plants & their ecosystems. There is a level of kindship and care built into Hearthstone's hand crafted herbal preparations that goes deeper than only using herbs imported from far away landscapes, where labor and environmental growing practices can be unknown and/or concealed.
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Behind the Business
Hearthstone Herbal was founded in 2022 by herbalist Gwen McCrone. She holds her Practical Herbalist Diploma from the Wild Rose College of Herbal Medicine, as well as Forestry Technician, Urban Forestry, and Arboriculture diplomas from Fleming College.
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A life long student of the land and of understanding how we fit in the wider ecology of the world around us, Gwen is an avid outdoorswoman with an insatiable passion for remembering what it is to be human upon the earth.
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Gwen is also a falconer, having hunted with her red-tailed hawk Kara for six seasons, and her kestrel Laima for two seasons.​
The Vision & Offerings
Hearthstone was born out of a desire for healing on the personal, community, and planetary levels. Walking the plant path is a commitment to honouring traditional lifeways, a vow to return to our inner knowing that lives in our bones, surviving through the disharmony that binds us to the demands of the modern world.
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I see herbalism and connection to our wild spaces as one way to actualize these things. In addition to browsing our non-toxic, salt of the earth products, you can also join us for on-farm herbal learning workshops. Current workshops on offer are:
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Grow Your Own Medicine Garden
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Herbal Medicine Making Workshop
More workshops are in gestation, so check back in the future for when they're ready.
All items in the shop are hand made by myself (Gwen), in small batches, with gentle long & slow infusion methods, macerating for many months. Each plant is harvested at peak potency, whether home garden grown or wild harvested, owing to an understanding of how each herb interacts with environmental and climactic factors.
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Each plant grown is done so without any chemical inputs. Just clean compost, wool and straw mulch, and clean well water. Wild harvested herbs are gathered with an understanding of the local ecology in mind, and done so with reverence and sustainable relationship at the foundation of it all.
Thanks to this, you can trust that each and every herbal product on offer is more than just safe for anointing your earthly body with; they are each vessels of remembrance, light posts guiding us to ways of being that are older and more potent than what you can find in a big box store.
Care for our earth is both self and community care. Return home.
