If you are using 'dog rose' hips for their vitamin C content, it helps to stew them first and drain off the liquid because there are lots of little hairs around the seeds. Strain it through a fine mesh - a bit tighter than for flour. (Proceed as if you are going to make either rose hip syrup or jelly. About the same quantity of water.) You could probably use R rugosa hips also. They're far less fiddly to skin and clean! A peaceful job for by the fire in mid- to late autumn. Catch them while they're still fleshy and before they 'mummify' on the bush over winter.

This is a fun and very enlightening discussion folks! Your story about New Dawn, Kim, seems to support the notion that the extent to which hips interfere with a rose's blooms depend on the "energy" reserves that the rose has to draw upon. Tough as nails roses like Knockout (as Michael mentioned) or the roses Jackie and Zack mentioned have such a reservoir of health and energy that hips are unlikely to affect them much in any climate unless something else interferes with their vitality. Notorious wimps like Tom Brown or Grey Pearl might be killed by one hip any time anywhere, assuming they set any in the first place. In your story of New Dawn, it sounds like the rose was able to build up a greater store of energy reserves in a climate pattern more to its liking, and therefore the hips affected it to a much lesser extent. I was wondering a related question to Michael's - is every rose hip that spontaneously appears on a bush pollinated so as to produce viable seed, and could it matter that you are deliberately trying to get your roses "pregnant" in your breeding efforts, which might take more energy for the rose than a random hip popping up here and there. I'm thinking of the analogy of chickens, and I don't know if it applies here. When chickens have a set of fertilized eggs, they shift all their energies from laying new eggs to brooding and caring for the bunch. The unfertilized eggs that we eat are expected to be "ever-blooming", however, every day or two. I imagine that you're also leaving the hips on the rose far longer than the random hips I encounter, which also makes a difference as you've already said in the recycle rate. Related to your squirrel comment, would it help to tie a netting or panty hose segment over the crosses to keep it on the bush even if the critters mess with it? Exhibitors seem to do something of the sort for show blooms. I could totally see me getting manic if a cross that I've waited years to develop got carried off by a witless tree rat that didn't really want to eat it anyway, and buried it somewhere in my neighbor's yard! Thanks for the enlightenment, everyone! Cynthia

The rose hip tea. MG, you don't have to clean them from seeds for this purpose :) Tea is usually made from dried hips. Rosa canina hips are classic, but Semiplena or Rugosa hips will work as well. The recipe is for 1 Qt of tea. Take a handful of dried hips and put it in the thermos bottle (the real one, the one that will keep temperature for hours)and fill thermos with boiling water to the top. Close thermos and let it stay for 4-8 hours or overnight. High temp helps extraction of flavors. You will have the most delicious tea, very dark and flavorable. With good thermos it will still be really hot. You can add some suguar if you like your tea sweet. Olga

Thanks mike, it's a start! wish someone, if anyone does this would comment, I'm sure someone's at least tried this before.