Welcome to the Blue Owl!

Blue Owl Garden Emporium herb farm offers locally and sustainably grown culinary herbs, edible flowers, herbal seasoning blends and teas, and a variety of other herbal concoctions. With about 200 dried herbs available during the winter and as many as 175 fresh ones during the summer, it's likely we can fill your every culinary herb need. All grown in Licking Co. Ohio without synthetic pesticides or artificial fertilizers.

We also offer culinary mushrooms, grow-your-own mushroom logs, native fruits, and various other forest edibles in season from our forest farm, Blue Owl Hollow. Our mushroom selection is seasonal and includes: shiitake, nameko, chestnut, mukitake, several oysters, wine-cap stropharia, lion's mane, reishi, turkey tail, and maitake. Not content with mere comestibles, we have a growing line of forest-derived crafts, such as rustic "rosewood" buttons (cleverly created from that invasive shrub every forest landowner loves to hate, multiflora rose!), fatwood firestarters, and Swedish log candles.

Our fascination with unusual-but-useful plants ensures that we always have something of interest on hand. Blue Owl products are available at several Central Ohio farmers markets and small businesses. Yes, inflation seems to be the new normal, but you can keep more of those dollars within our community by visiting your favorite Central Ohio farmers markets and patronizing other locally-owned businesses!

Welcome to 2025! Or Rather, How to Beat the Mid-Winter Blues....

It's the start of a new year and a new growing season, but that's a little hard to wrap one's mind around after the weather we've had lately. Personally, I'm a fan of snow -- it brightens the landscape wonderfully, compared to the usual dull gray-brown of dead vegetation -- but it does make one feel COLD. One solution? Drink a mug of herbal tea and think of the warmer days to come. Or take a workshop to learn more about growing your own foodstuffs. Try cooking something new and different and make it spicy. The Blue Owl can help with all of these!

Classes, Workshares, Workshops:

Keller Market House: Plan Your Herb Garden

Thursday, February 20th, 6:00 - 8:00 pm at Keller Market House, Lancaster OH
Make this the year you grow your own herbs! Janell Baran of Blue Owl Garden Emporium will explain which herbs grow well here in Ohio, how their growing requirements differ from vegetables or flowers, choosing between seeds and plant starts, timing your plantings, and much more. Participants will have the opportunity to sow seed in 3" pots to take home for a head start on this summer's herbal bounty. Class fee is $35. Register at the Keller Market House website.

Keller Market House: Mushroom Production for the Home Grower

Monday, March 10th, 6:00 - 8:00 pm at Keller Market House, Lancaster OH
Mushrooms make a wonderful complement to freshly harvested herbs and vegetables from your garden and are not any more difficult to grow. Janell Baran of Blue Owl Hollow Forest Farm will demonstrate a straight-forward log inoculation technique suitable for small-scale production of several different culinary mushrooms such as shiitake, oyster, and lion's mane. Given the right situation and basic maintenance, these logs will thrive for years in your yard, shade garden, or woodlot. Log harvesting, site selection, care of inoculated logs, and various mushroom cultivation resources will be discussed. Optional: In your registration, you may choose to pre-order an inoculated mushroom log from Blue Owl to take home the night of the class. Class fee is $35, shiitake-inoculated logs are $50. Please RSVP by calling Keller Market House at 740-277-6305 or emailing info@kellermarkethouse.org.

2025 Mushroom Workshare Dates & Times:

Signups for Blue Owl's 2025 mushroom workshare dates are open; come learn everything there is to know about growing mushrooms on logs. Here's how it works:

Every Sunday afternoon (noon-4) and Tuesday all-day (10-6) for about 8 weeks in very early spring, you have the opportunity to join me in renewing Blue Owl Hollow's mushroom production infrastructure by inoculating new hardwood logs with various types of culinary mushroom spawn. You'll learn the process, get a tour of our mushroom production area, and have the opportunity to earn your own log to take home. Email if you are interested, pre-registration is REQUIRED. If a date is marked FULL but it's the only time you can make it, please let me know anyway; we can add you to a waiting list, since cancellations do occur.

Here's the 2025 schedule:

Introducing the Blue Owl Herb Growing workshare!

OK, so this was supposed to happen last year and for several very good reasons -- flooding, drought, orphaned oil well plugging, death in the family -- didn't get scheduled. But this year it will! Many people have asked about an herb-focused workshare and I think I've finally found the right project: herb bed re-vitalization and maintenance. With 60+ raised production beds for growing herbs, the need to be reinforcing, re-planting, weeding, fertilizing, and generally maintaining beds is never-ending. Sometimes it's just a matter of weeding and mulching existing plantings, but often a bed pretty much needs to be rebuilt from scratch. One weekend of every month during the growing season (May - October, Saturday or Sunday afternoons, depending on weather), you are welcome to join Janell in renewing one of the Blue Owl Garden Emporium production beds from the ground up. While we work, we'll talk about soils and fertility, crop rotation, pest control, the history and growing requirements of specific herbs, planting techniques, weeding strategies, etc. The workshare is free and participants will leave with a better understanding of how to construct long-term planting areas... and most likely also take away plant starts, herb cuttings, seeds, or other gifts from the garden.

You are also invited to join us on a weekday the week before the workshare to assist in gathering the necessary materials for bed building, primarily rocks gathered from along the forest farm trail system. Some trail maintenance may be necessary to accomplish this task -- cutting up downed trees, filling in washed out areas, putting in water bars, etc. -- so it's a great opportunity to learn hands-on about forest farming, too.

Note: this will be a new workshare, so there'll undoubtedly be some refinement required as we go along, please be patient. As with the mushroom workshare, pre-registration is REQUIRED. Email if you are interested or have any questions!

Tentative 2025 schedule (subject to rescheduling due to weather):

Past news items of interest, including links to various presentation materials, are also available.

January 2025

Loose-leaf teas:

Seasonings:

Dried herbs
(~150 varieties)

Forest products:

Crafted products: