Vitamin C, from pine needles or?

[Dexter]

I once read that you could get sufficient vitamin C from making a pine needle tea- does that sound right?
Could it have been fir trees, spruces or??

I am hoping to find a source of vitamin C for back up- in the event I have a poor orchard year, or the cellar goes moldy, etc etc. Thanks for any ideas!

[Bearfootfarm]

It's White Pine that has the most
5 times more than lemons

[Ernie]

Pine Needle Tea tastes like you're drinking distilled floor cleaner.

Dandelion greens aren't bad at all and have a lot of vitamin C. If you want maximum vitamin C that stores really well, make horseradish sauce or sauerkraut.

[Txsteader]

Rose hips are also a superb source of Vitamin C.

[Danaus29]

I think I would prefer rose hips or sumac berries. Not poison sumac, staghorn sumac.

[Dexter]

I'm thinking about winter.
Vitamin C seems quite volatile in that it is lost in cooking/dehydrating and I assume long term storage as well?? Dandelion greens don't arrive till at least April here.
I imagine rose hips lose vitamin content? Sumac berries surely lose effectiveness?

[Dexter]

Ernie- have you tried it with honey?
I tried the tea as a kid and didn't mind it one bit. But, there make have just been a pinch of needles rather than a stew?

[texican]

Inuits eat their meat raw, and get vitamin c from it. First white explorers cooked their meat, and encountered scurvy.

I don't know if it's only arctic animals that have vitamin c... if it works up there, it should be the same everywhere.

I'd rather get my C from pine needles first.

[Cyngbaeld]

Plant dog roses. The hips dry and store very well and are higher in vit c than anything else that grows in north America.

[damoc]

long time ago i read that fish bones dried and ground were a source of vitamin c i have no idea if that is fact or not

perhaps somebody can confirm this?

also read about pine needles being good with a little honey in the tea

[cindy71]

Would that also enclude southern pine niddles? If so I have a GLOD mine. My property is covered with pine trees. Now what to do with sweet gum trees. Any ideas. Cindy

[Ernie]

Originally Posted by Dexter

Ernie- have you tried it with honey?
I tried the tea as a kid and didn't mind it one bit. But, there make have just been a pinch of needles rather than a stew?

I can't abide it in any dose.

I don't share the love of wild plants that many of you do. I memorize them in a pinch and try them occasionally just to keep in practice, but I MUCH prefer domesticated sources of various vitamins.

I also notice that there's a whole lot of "I read in a book once ..." in this thread. I encourage y'all to try it and see for yourself. Once y'all done that then I think we'll be having us a "Sauerkraut versus Onions for Vitamin C" thread.

[whodunit]

Yeah, I'm thinkin' sauerkraut on a bratwurst for my vitamin C!!!

[Ernie]

Now you're talking, whodunit!

Tailor your garden with your health in mind, even if it means expanding your "vegetable vocabulary".

My garden is arranged around three conditions, which are (in order of priority):

1. Will we eat it? (Does no good to plant something if we don't eat much of it.)
2. How easy is it to harvest and store? (Does no good if it rots in the field or the cellar before you can finish it all.)
3. Will it fill a dietary niche? (Does it contain high degrees of something we would otherwise be lacking?)

My garden is primarily composed of onions, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, squash, and cabbages. There's a few things thrown in that I like in small degrees like kohlrabi, broccoli, and brussel sprouts ... but the bulk of the garden goes towards items we eat in large quantities and store.

Vitamin C is somewhat problematic, which is why it's one of the first vitamin deficiencies to hit the human body during lean times. Here's why:

First and foremost, your body doesn't store it anywhere. It's not in your fat cells, your liver, or anything.

Next, your body is only capable of absorbing smallish amounts of it at a time. The daily RDA is 60mg but most nutritionists say we need closer to 200mg per day, or even about 500mg a day when our body is fighting off sickness or healing. (They came up with 60mg as the minimal amount needed to avoid scurvy; not the amount that will actually make you feel healthy.)

Next, taking those 1000mg a day capsules doesn't do you any good. Your body excretes almost all of that, particularly if you don't take it with a healthy amount of niacin (which is required for your body to absorb vitamins at all).

Five foods high in Vitamin C that I like:
---
Cabbages! The Vitamin C is not lost through cooking or long-term storage. Did I mention I love sauerkraut? I'm going to eat some as soon as I finish this message.

Peppers! All peppers contain SOME but colored peppers contain a lot more.

Tomatoes! Easy to grow, easy to store (freeze them, sauce them, drop them whole into soups), and tasty as well. All summer long my wife keeps a sauce pot boiling on the stove, reducing 2-3 bushels of tomatoes per day down into sauce which she freezes. She also drops squash, peppers, and the occasional zucchini into the mix as well.

Onions! Very high in vitamins overall, and particularly vitamin C. Ever notice that the Nordic countries where they never even SAW citrus didn't really get scurvy? Those vikings grew up straight and tall with nary a bent leg among them. Onions and garlic were the key.

Potatoes! Serve them with every meal. They contain each and every vitamin the human body needs with vitamin D being the only exception. I'm trying to break all previous records on my farm this year and harvest over 1 ton of potatoes. If I get even an average yield off of the plants I have in the ground now then I'm going to harvest 900 pounds, and I still have over half an acre left to plant! Fried potatoes, mashed potatoes, stewed potatoes, boiled potatoes ... I'm the Bubba Gump of potatoes.

[bee]

sorry but I have to ask our resident 'tater king a question..all that starch(3 meals a DAY?) is it how you fix them that makes them healthy ? Not french fried with all the grease and salt..do you boil, bake and mash as opposed to frying??

Yield. I planted aprox 25 pounds of seed potatoes in about 75 foot of row(yes I know I plant them too close)your guess on yield? Your favorite variety?


Now back on topic..don't forget those pretty purple violets for vitamin C, young leaves in salad and later cooked as well as the flower candied or fresh( yes I have eaten the flowers!) Wild mustard and purslane(yes and yes) nettles(no)

[Cyngbaeld]

Don't forget your lawn. You can put fresh (chemical free) grass into a blender with some water, run the blender and strain out the liquid. It has lots of vitamins, including c. Don't eat the grass as there is too much fiber for humans to digest and it can cause serious impactions.

[wyld thang]

roasted is my favorite way of making potatoes. If you want you can toss them in olive oil and garlic.

I've made doug fir tea to try, it wasn't bad. It tasted just like doug fir smells--pitchy and sour. But not bad, more sour than pitchy. There are lots of plants and stuff with Vit C.

You can google nutrient content of weeds to get info.

[Tracy Rimmer]

The little tender ends of spruce are the best source, as they're not as strongly flavored.

However -- like others, I'd rather get my VitC elsewhere -- it's not a flavor I particularly enjoy. Grow roses in your garden (the wild varieties are better than the cultivated varieties) and collect the dried hips in September or October. Keep them in a cool, dry spot, away from the light, and crush them and use them as a tea as needed. Much better source, and not nearly so nasty flavored. You can also make a syrup from the fresh hips in the summer, and use this as a VitC dosage -- a spoonful of the syrup is quite nice, actually

[Ernie]

Originally Posted by bee

sorry but I have to ask our resident 'tater king a question..all that starch(3 meals a DAY?) is it how you fix them that makes them healthy ? Not french fried with all the grease and salt..do you boil, bake and mash as opposed to frying??

Yield. I planted aprox 25 pounds of seed potatoes in about 75 foot of row(yes I know I plant them too close)your guess on yield? Your favorite variety?


Now back on topic..don't forget those pretty purple violets for vitamin C, young leaves in salad and later cooked as well as the flower candied or fresh( yes I have eaten the flowers!) Wild mustard and purslane(yes and yes) nettles(no)

I am, at best, a tater duke.

I boil them, I bake them, I fry them, I mash them ... it's all just according to my mood. I love to make double the normal batch of mashed the night before, then the next day fry some bacon and mash out patties from the cold leftovers.

I absolutely do not worry about starch (or any other thing that doctors say we shouldn't eat too much of). It's just after lunch and I've already burned up about 3000 calories moving beehives, cinder blocks, and (you guessed it) planting potatoes.

Yield is hard to determine. It varies from year to year according to temperature and rainfall, as well as how properly you hill them up. This year I planted Red Pontiac, Yukon Gold, Russet Burbank, and some freaky red ones that Forerunner unloaded on me last time we met. Out of the reds I expect about 3 pounds per plant and somewhere between 2-5 from the Yukon Golds. Russet Burbank typically yields me about 5 pounds per plant.

That's also heavily based on soil fertility. In my kitchen garden (about 9000 square feet) I have very good soil and heavily amended by compost and manure. I usually get much higher yields there than the truck garden (a little over a half acre) which hasn't been amended as much.

Forerunner's garden yields will make you want to beat your head on the ground and cry like a toddler as he consistently pulls in about 2-3 times what I do off the same varieties and plants. That's partly due to his soil fertility, partly due to the seeds he's been selecting for decades, and partly due to the amount of time he puts into it. You have to watch his plants though. They've been fed whole cows before and have developed a taste for flesh. Vines tend to grab your ankles if you walk through there and try to pull you down into the compost.

[bee]

thanks Ernie!! That mental picture of a vine wrapped ankle and me clawing for a hold in nice crumbly compost soil where every plant just yanks right out by the roots and....(breaking a sweat here, I see a whole new SciFi craze...)

so you figure by pounds per plant(would that be hill?)...?