Tincture of Rice Krispies - (Pine Pollen 2)

It's a drag being trapped in the house in the winter time, but trapped in the house in summer is painful. It's so green and lush out there but we can only look and sigh ..

Why are we trapped in the house?

BUGS!!

In some ways, this being a peak year for insects is a good thing. Those goddamn blackflies and horseflies and deerflies and mosquitoes don't just get by on a steady diet of blood, they're also pollinators. (Well some of them are, I don't know if they all are). And they're food for birds and other critters. Circle of life, and all that. I certainly don't begrudge the frogs and swallows their due.

But this year, by some cruel (to us and the other mammals) twist of fate, these bugs that usually come in stages - first one evil blood sucking, itchy welt producing menace and then the next - are overlapping, God help us.

Right this minute, they all lurk outside our door.



I tell you this to set the stage, so to speak. So that you know that while we were merrily plucking 'catkins' of pollen from pine trees we were beset upon by monstrous winged creatures that could, literally, drive a human mad. Oh the things we do for "fun" around here ..

Not just fun, of course. We're getting older, and as we plan on living a lot longer, we're setting our sites on those medicine plants and foods (and activities) that will help to ensure we stay hale, hearty and compos mentis into our very old age. Pine pollen (see the info and links in the last post) seems to fit into that category.

Yesterday wasn't too bad. We knew we were awfully late in the season to be finding anything we could use, but my spidey-senses told me we'd find some trees that hadn't finished pollinating if we went to the island (that's Grand Calumet, the one my kitchen window looks out on, across the Ottawa River from us). We ended up at Cotes Jaune, a nice little area with a beach and a park with lots of lovely pines.

Pic stolen from this site

This picture of Sweetfern
is also stolen, sorry, no source

Paul was unable to take pics for me, as he had headed in for a dip in the river (he said it was cold) while I headed into those trees you can see in the pic above. Weirdly, there were hardly any bugs in that spot. I found out later that was because the fragrant colony of "sweetfern" (Comptonia), that was all around me - miracle of miracles - repels mosquitoes! I'm gonna transplant some of those into my yard, believe me.


White pines are TALL, it took me a while to find any I could reach. I also got distracted by nibbling at the red berries from the carpet of wintergreen at my feet, yum .. but now I digress .. In the end, I didn't get as many 'catkins' as I wanted off the one little tree I could reach, so today, super early in the morning, we headed out again to an area closer to home and picked some more. It was gorgeous there, a winding road through a forest with cliffs rising up on one side and streams and beaver marshes on the other but so fucking buggy I don't want to talk about it.

click to embiggen
batch #2, spread out to dry a little

The conditions were less than ideal in other ways, too. Not only are these catkins really a little 'past it', compared to those in the video I put up in the last post, the day was/is extremely muggy and threatening rain. If I'd been going for pollen in its raw state I wouldn't have picked today, the moisture would cause it to spoil in no time. But since I'm making a tincture, I have more leeway.

Despite the conditions, each of these little catkins still gave off a poof of pollen as I touched them, and as they're getting a chance to dry out a little, they're shedding more by the hour. Excellent.

Cute little suckers, ain't they? They should have been picked when they had more of a greenish cast than this, but .. whatever.

The garbling (sorting and cleaning) of pine pollen catkins is a bit of a fiddle-faddle, but fun. My fingers got all yellow as I took the little rice-krispie looking catkins from the first batch off their stems. They all went into one jar, along with the scrapings of pollen that had fallen into the bowl. The needles and stems went into another. They had a fair amount of pollen stuck to them too, glued onto the resin they were exuding.

I poured vodka on the rice-krispies pollen catkins and apple cider vinegar over the needles & stems. The latter will make a deliciously tangy vinegar for salad dressings, and it would probably make a nice gargle (mixed with water) if we felt a cold coming on. Pine is really good medicine ..

(Except turpentine, which is made from pine; turpentine is not good medicine. Sure, you can use it externally if you insist but please my friends, don't use turpentine internally. Ever. I don't care what you've read on the internet, it's just not safe. We've had this discussion before, I know, but it bears repeating.)


 .. and all parts of the tree can be used in some way, even for gunshot wounds! Matthew Wood repeats a story he heard from a Navajo man who used the sap of pinyon pine to pull a bullet out of his horse. "It left the wound clean, and a good skin formed afterward". Not that any of us expect to have to remove bullets, but its handy to know.

The Bach flower remedy (flower essence) is used to reduce feelings of self-blame and guilt. I suppose, if I wanted to, I could use those little catkins to make a flower essence. I just might do that if I have any left over after I top up my jars of tincture and vinegar with today's pickings.

Tincture on the left, vinegar on the right.
You can see the pollen floating to the top of both jars.

It will be ready in a few weeks, and we'll report back once we try it out.

Later, gaters!