unplanned harvest

Now I know that any time we go into the bush in search of adventure, we must be prepared to do some harvesting and/or scavenging. The other day when we had our friends from Victoria visiting, we decided to take the drive up to Virgin Falls to see what everyone was talking about.


Dan figured it would take about 2 hours to drive up. We were making good time though, and didn't need 4WD yet, so we took a brief detour to Second Bridge (bottom of Kennedy Lake) to show our friends the place where we go fishing, where we found our tin boat, where we might go camping one day.

While we were there, these bright red bulbs on the bushes announced they were ready to be harvested. O no!, said I, I brought no bucket or vessel to gather food with! Luckily Burgle did, she had a small bucket in the back of their truck. With the four of us gathering, we filled this 2L bucket in about ten minutes.

This was the day of the Ten Hour Duck, so the plan for these rosehips was to use them as a sauce for the duck. This amount of fruit yielded about 700mL of liquid. It was a bit on the tart/astringent side, and Dan didn't sweeten it much, but it was nice. Probably good on vanilla ice cream.

In case you are wondering, the first thing you have to do with rosehips is snip the flowery bits off the end. then you slice them in half lengthwise, then pick out the seeds. This is a very long process but worth the effort, especially if you have friends helping you.