September. An early fall, the right time to get yourself prepared for upcoming cold winter days. So let us resupply with some beautiful, tasty and Vitamin-C filled rose hips.
First of all we have to gather some. I go outside at the edge of the town where suburban wilderness begins and in our place there are always plenty of wild rose bushes. Try to find some they are not located right to motorways, be a little more sport and find some remote location to gather them.
So spend some time picking the red rose hips and watch out for thorns (or use gloves)! Use a plastic bag to store and transport them. I do not recommend the leather backpack I usually use every day since though the rose hips are generally pretty solid you may squish some of them by accident and it's hard to get all the sticky rose hip seeds and hair out of the leather pack.
After you gather a sufficient amount of them it's time to dry them. I use electric fruit dryer in combination with letting them dry naturally which means I take the drying frames from a dryer and put them in some place in my flat till they are dry. It really takes some time. You may find some of them rock hard after few days while others are still quite squishy (like raisins).
When they are perfectly dry we can grind them. It's better to really let dry the hell out of them. You may wait a few weeks till they are rock hard but they will be just right, easy to grind without squishy mess.
You may want to crush them with brute force of a bludgeon weapon or use a submerge blender (I do submerge the blender into a plastic cup half full of rose hips) and make them grind for a while.
After few seconds you have some kind of coarse powder. You can sieve the powder using the fine sieve at the moment to get rid of the "hair" which might irritate your throat drinking the rose hip herbal tea, or let them in. I let them in, but I am using a fine tea sieve so some of them (hashtag not all!) may get into the tea. Which is annoying but nothing I could not cope with. And it tastes better because while sieving you might get rid of some portion of dried husk full of vitamins.
And we are finished. We have a supply of vitamin c loaded herbal (probably organic if you are into buzz words) remedy which allow you to survive the cold days of autumn and winter. I store the powder in a bigger can with a lid to avoid it to get wet from air humidity and let it be eaten by flour moths.
The tea preparation is also very easy. Have a tea sieve full of dried ground rose hips per cup (250-300 ml). Pour hot or boiling water in. Let the infusion run for circa 15 minutes. Enjoy!
If you have questions please ask, otherwise feel free to comment, share, up-vote etc.