As this season’s Port Townsend Farmers Market prepares to open April 5, one longtime vendor is looking at a serious milestone.

Denise Joy’s herbalist business has weathered four decades, including a dramatic expansion in the local community, and an inspection by the Food and Drug Administration 10 years ago that required her to demonstrate that practices meet their standards.

Joy started the Mountain Spirit Herbal Co. in January of 1985 in Santa Fe New Mexico and brought it with when moved to Port Townsend in August of that year. Back then, the population numbered “only a couple of thousand” local residents.

Joy is a fourth-generation herbalist who cites her status as “the only surviving descendant of an oral herbal tradition passed from woman to woman.” She was mentored by an aunt living in Hawaii, but especially by a great-grandmother who emigrated to New York City from Russia, where her skills would have been “punishable by death.”

Joy, who graduated from high school with honors at 16, had to learn Yiddish and memorize her great-grandmother’s instructions, since they weren’t written down. But even at an early age, she knew herbalism was her vocation, well ahead of when broader American culture became aware of herbalism as a practice.

“I’ve always been big into gardening,” said Joy, who currently operates her home-based business on seven wooded acres on the outskirts of town. She was one of the first vendors at the Port Townsend Farmers Market.

Joy’s herbal products include oils, balms, tinctures, herbal teas, creams and even dry herbs, and just as she was rigorously instructed on how to use herbs properly, so too has she conducted herbal apprentice classes and mentored more than 75 apprentices throughout Washington and the Pacific Northwest.

“Every herb has a side-effect, but you can’t trust the internet to always tell you what all of those side-effects might be,” Joy said. “You have to know how they’re all going to interact with each other.”

Joy credited such attention to detail with helping the Mountain Spirit Herbal Co. survive after the FDA turned its attention to her small business in 2015, imposing the same rules on Mountain Spirit as it does on large pharmaceutical companies, regarding any claims about what their respective products can or cannot do.

For Joy, this meant moving all of her products out of any potential drug designation into dietary supplement, food or cosmetic designations. That  included removing the medical term “sinus” from the description of one of her tinctures, now named “Snot Not,” so as to avoid even the appearance of selling medicine without a license.

Joy estimated that making that transition in her business practices ran her roughly $30,000, of which she credited the surrounding community with raising around $10,000, while she raised the remainder. As of 2022, that investment appears to have paid off, since she’s met all the FDA’s requirements.

“They looked at how I kept my books, and checked where I get my products, how I identify them, what processes they go through, and where they end up,” said Joy, who maintains documents of each step in those procedures. “I got zero dings from the FDA, which is a big deal.”

The Mountain Spirit Herbal Co. has expanded into venues such as the Food Co-op of Port Townsend and the Chimacum Corner Farmstand and it’s also venturing abroad. The company also has sales in countries such as Finland, Ireland and Saudi Arabia.

“I’ve never really had a big advertising presence,” Joy said. “I’ve always just been tenacious.”