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Rose hips, that is. I've always wanted to make rose hip jelly and rose hip wine, and wondered when the best time is to gather them. Most of the ones I've seen on the roadsides are orange now; do I have to wait till they're a darker colour, or are they now at their peak?

Also, does anyone have any rosehip wine recipes they'd like to share?

Cheers
Andrea
NZ

Hi Andrea, I have a file of recipes & stuff for rose & rosehips that I'll pm to you. I warn you though, it's big - so transfer it into a file on your 'pooter as soon as you can.

Thanks, HHP, have replied to your PM.

Cheers!
Andrea
NZ

What do rose hips look like, am a bit dense where stuff like that's concerned and am also a bit wary of plants in NZ.
Wouldn't mind having a go at the wine myself but still haven't managed to find any second hand Demi johns.

Yet lol ... still am looking.

Sky - just put rosehips into google images, and you'll see lots. They are those big, bright orange berries on the wilding rose plants in shelter belts all over the area now.

I was lucky enough to find several nice glass demijohns on Trade Me a few years back, complete with airlocks, but you can also use those food grade plastic buckets, 10 liter size, and fit the lid with an airlock that you can get from Bin Inn.

Cheers
Andrea
NZ

Are absolutely any rosehips safe then Andrea, have just googled images now?

I'll have to get foraging!

As far as I know, any are safe, but the wilding ones are the highest in vitamin C from what I've been told, and the ones which are the most flavoursome. You wouldn't want to use the rose hip on a garden type rose, but you could in a pinch. You can also plant the individual seeds in the wilding ones, and get true-to-type plants, if I remember correctly.

Cheers
Andrea
NZ

The colour depends a bit on the type - at least from the ones we have here in Europe, so you can't just go after that to decide when to pick...

Gidday

The fruit of the sweet briar, the weed that grows especially prolifically in the South Island but the rest of the country in not quite as many numbers.

Central Otago was briar free in the 1940's and 50's because of the plague of rabbits but the rabbits bunbers were reduced then the whole area was totally overwhelmed by the sweet briar. Then the townies would flock to the countryside to harvest the hips from them and the rose hip industry in New Zealand boomed.

A bit of useless local info even if you didn't want to hear it.

I'm not sure what types you'd have in NZ (being in the UK) but one of the comonest ones we have is the dog rose (rosa canina) a five petalled flower in anything from white through to deep pink which has oval hips which go a bright scarlet when ripe. Try looking for it under the latin name on google images & you should find pics of both flower & hips.

It's the one I use most often, although there is also Rosa Rugosa which has similar flowers but a much spinier stemand very large round hips almost like tomatos! These tend to be grown as a garden plant or in parks (very rare to find wildings) but the hips are huge & the plant is prolific!

They look like this:

Rosehip syrup on plain yogurt is one of my favourite treats Hmmmm.....

One of the negs about living in nz is that you just don't see or get the diversety of plants and wildlife that you do in the uk.
I so miss just about everyrthing from my childhood, we used to pick wild brambles when I was a child but my village Oooop north was descimated a long time ago

Gidday

Hey Sky, I don't know whereabouts you are but I do know there are losta places that you can pick blackberries. Our biggest trouble is that we have too bloody many of those up top plants down here. The likes of hawthorn is another one mentioned on these pages that is here and we would rather not have em.

Here is the sweet brier that I was talking about.

http://www.floralimages.co.uk/prosarubig.htm

Definitely you can use those hips, they look ideal.

Sky, you're near Chch, aren't you? There are heaps of wild blackberries around here, just picked a bucketful a couple of days ago, and there are plenty more ripening up (as long as we get some more warm weather before winter sets in...). I think there's a lot more than you realise, as there's lots of edible natives, so you have the fun all over again, of learning about wild food foraging.

This week we will be picking up acorns, picking the last of the wilding apples, blackberries, hawthorne berries and rose hips. Pretty good for one week, eh, and barely have to get out of the car to do it. There's heaps in the bush, but I'm still learning about that as well.

Cheers
Andrea
NZ