



Nomadic Harvests is an herbal apothecary and fermentary offering education, natural bodycare and ferments. Inspired by the seasonal rhythms of the land, we work to facilitate connection to plants and the magic of the natural world. We are based on an off-grid property in the beautiful Wheaton River Valley, where we live and teach workshops. We bring our creations to various local markets around Whitehorse, Yukon.
Meet the crafters
Angelune Drouin is an herbalist and fermentista who’s been calling the Yukon home since 2006. Co-founder and president of the Yukon Plant Guild, she is also the founder of Nomadic Harvests, where she acts as “master of all recipes and impossible projects”.
Growing up on the edge of the boreal wilderness in North-East Laurentia, Angelune spent her youth hearing what crows, ferns and violets had to say. One day Spruce came up and gave a bit of resin to heal her cuts, bringing forth her witch’s journey.
For the last decade, she’s been studying plants and slowly nurturing her medicine-making art, fermenting foods and crafting herbal products for her community. When she finds herself with a bunch of vibrant harvests, her creativity takes over and surprising concoctions emerge.
Elated witness of nature’s marvels, Angelune strives to be invisible and handle beauty as delicately as possible. She likes her hikes slow and meandering, with lots of kisses on flower petals. When she’s not out in the forest or garden, she can be seen garbling wild herbs or pensively seeking the word exact enough to land on the page.
Jalfred Deichsel is a permaculturist and fermentista who’s been calling the Yukon home since 2016. He has completed a Permaculture Design Certificate with Verge and is the co-owner of Nomadic Harvests, where he acts as “master of excel sheets and cabbage shredder”.
Growing up in the rainy foothills of Central Cascadia, Jalfred found that bushwhacking and stream hopping was more fun than listening to plants. That is, until Devil’s Club poked him on the shoulder and shared their strength, sending him on the Green Man’s path.
For the last decade, he’s been peeling inner barks, digging up twisted roots, collecting fungi and gracing his community with magical brews.
Jalfred is a spark-creator and river-listener who likes to harvest wild seeds and rainwater, propagate plants to get to know them and peek over the next ridge to see who might be living there. If he finds himself with an opening, he climbs on through to explore the other side.
When he’s not out in the forest or garden, he can be seen playing music or puzzling over tricky problems.
Our story
Nomadic Harvests was born in the backyard of a drafty A-frame cabin, sheltered by scrawny spruce trees and shrouded in scents of labrador tea. It started with a little bit of olive oil, some beeswax and spruce pitch. The garden vegetables wanted in, and they came along, with a little salt and time. After 10 years of gestation in the womb of the Boreal forest, Nomadic Harvests made its first human outing at a Christmas market with cases of bubbly mason jars and amber bottles full of medicine. This was November 2017, and the harvesters had yet to determine which activity would have its way: bodycare, fermentation, or education? But diversity being the natural rule, Nomadic Harvests kept building on these important activities to connect plant, bacteria, fungi and human all together.



Our values
We value resilience and autonomy, and that’s why teaching is a big part of what we do. We empower people with skills they can develop themselves, reconnecting them with human traditions long-forgotten. Our main vocabulary is “raw”, “natural” and “from scratch”. Most of what we make could be replicated at home with simple ingredients and a bit of patience.




Our inspiration
Nomadic Harvests allows us to step back from the human-dominated world to connect with nature as a whole. When we give fermentation workshops and teach foraging classes, we share that primordial connection with people, fueled by a deep respect and desire to engage positively with the land and all living beings.
We draw knowledge from European folk herbalism and relate to all traditions worldwide whose connection to the healing power of plants have endured through centuries.
We are indebted to the long history First Nations have with the plants on their traditional land, and are grateful to be able to work with these local plants, many of which our own Scottish, Irish, French and German ancestors traditionally worked with.
Botanists, herbalists, fermentistas and writers inspiring our journey include Robin Wall Kimmerer, Beverley Gray, Stephen Harrod Buhner, Michael Moore, Kirsten K. Shockey Sandor Katz, Peter McCoy, David Abram, Pascal Baudar…
“How can we reciprocate the gifts of the Earth?
In gratitude, in ceremony, through acts of practical reverence and land stewardship, in fierce defense of the places we love, in art, in science, in song, in gardens, in children, in ballots, in stories of renewal, in creative resistance, in how we spend our money and our precious lives, by refusing to be complicit with the forces of ecological destruction. Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and dance for the renewal of the world.”
– Robin Wall Kimmerer