We sure did not know triple_b ! You would be welcome Florence. You can just pick a little amount of rose petals during the summer (Zephy is a good choice!) and keep them in small bags in the freezer until you have enough to make the jam). Btw Here is another great link for all the rose products one´s heart can desire. (Including the Rose Petal Jam). Best Rose Oil, Water (Get the little atomizer!). I use the Rose Oil in aromatherapy lamps and it scents the house those winter days when I long for roses and summer and read rose books. Do check this link there is lots of information and pictures about the production of Bulgarian rose products. Here is a link that might be useful: Bulgarian Rose Oil and products

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 for that link, Cupshaped, the differences in percentages are interesting. Ethne Clark's book is lovely and all the different garden photographs are fairly well identified which is good. I gathered about a gallon of fresh roses (which with the bases of the petals removed yielded 4oz. So I made jam. Her jam recipe calls for less sugar than yours, a touch of honey and a small amount of lemon juice. I found that Tess of the D'Urbervilles gave the most magnificent reddish purple color to the juice. Ethne recommended using petals like Rosa Gallica for her recipes. I cannot imagine how many hectares of Rosa Gallica it would take to yield a pound of rose petals. This was my way to use up some of the last, fresh, fragrant blooms of fall before the freeze that was predicted for last night.

Hah, I googled 'nchfp rose hips', because it is that time again, and found this old thread I had forgotten about! Too late to learn from my own mistakes documented here, though :-). But hopefully next time I will remember to look this up. This year, I'm doing a different made up method, simmering the rose hips until soft and then mashing with a potato masher. Maybe I'll try some lemon or lime juice, like the recipes in this thread. I'm not aiming for jelly, just syrup. That's what the previous batch ended up being, and it was so very tasty. if I had looked up this thread in time, I think I would have tried the freezer jam version, putting the raw rose hips in the juicer. I had them in the freezer already, so they would be mushy enough to get pretty good juice with just the juicer, I imagine. But instead I am doing the cooking method.