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Photo Credit: Nancy Engel

Rose hips are loaded with vitamin C – a perfect way to boost your immune system!

Roses have a lot more to offer than just their beautiful blooms. In late summer and early fall, beautiful rose hips take over the plant to put on a gorgeous show of color. But that’s not all: If you harvest these hips, you can take advantage of the many health benefits they offer.

Tests prove that ounce for ounce, rose hip pulp contains more vitamin C than citrus! It’s also got beta-carotene, bioflavinoids, calcium, citrates, citric acid, iron malates, malic acid, niacin, phosphorus and vitamins A, B1, B2, E and K. As if that’s not enough, rose hips’ astringency makes them as good as cranberries for urinary tract problems for humans (and dogs per my veterinarian). Virtually all roses produce fruit containing these similar nutrients.

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Photo Credit: Maureen Gilmer

Rugosa rose hips ripen at season’s end just as the foliage begins to fade. If you don’t harvest it, the fruit will remain even after a snowfall, creating bright red accents in the cold season.

Both ever-blooming and once-blooming roses produce hips, but some (like carpet roses), bear hips too small to be worthwhile. The once-bloomers make harvesting easy because all the hips ripen at the same time. Fortunately, most wild roses (or those found naturalized at abandoned homes) are once-bloomers. The easiest way to harvest ever-bloomers like tea roses is to simply stop clipping off spent flowers near season’s end so the plants have enough time to produce their large fruit before killing frosts spoil the crop.

While rose hips start out green as the seed develops inside, they’ll ripen to bright red, orange or purple with fall’s short days and cool nights. The color tells you when hips are ripe for harvest, but you can also take a nibble to test them yourself.

A ripe hip also feels soft to the touch because it’s composed of sugar-rich flesh that surrounds the seeds. One end will bear the stem and the other the residual calyx that once enclosed the flower bud. Rose seeds are packed with prickly fibers into a dense mass surrounded by this outer fleshy covering.

Preparation of rose hips involves separating the seeds and fibers from the useful flesh. It’s a tedious job, slicing each hip in half and scooping seeds and fibers out one by one, but it’s the best way to use fresh hips for tea or to mince and add to baking recipes like cookies and muffins. (This tedious hip-preparation job may explain why the big shooter marble-sized hips of the Japanese Rosa rugosa hybrids make the plant the favorite species for harvesting. These nearly disease-free, upright roses can be grown in long hedges at fence lines and property boundaries. They’re easy to pick, and such extensive plantings ensure you’ll get enough fruit each year to work with.)